Today, the Court of Justice of the EU handed down its judgment in a(nother) Spanish case concerning the Unfair Terms Directive. For a summary of the facts and of the Opinion of A-G Trstenjak in this case, I refer to an earlier post on this blog.
The CJEU reached a conclusion similar to the one of the A-G, holding that:
'the Spanish procedural legislation is not
compatible with the Directive in so far as it makes impossible or excessively difficult, in
proceedings initiated by sellers or suppliers against consumers, the application of the protection
which the Directive intends to confer on those consumers.'
And:
'where they find that there is an unfair term, national courts are required solely to
exclude the application of such a term in order that it does not produce binding effects with regard
to the consumer, without having the power to revise the content of that term. The contract
containing the term must continue in existence, in principle, without any amendment other than that
resulting from the deletion of the unfair terms, in so far as, in accordance with the rules of domestic
law, such continuity of the contract is legally possible.'
See the text of the judgment and the press release for more information.
