The European Commission has determined that, in broad terms, the Product Liability Directive, which has been in place for over 30 years, is still fit for purpose but requires further work.
The Russian government is preparing to introduce new counter-measures in response to US and EU sanctions. and filed a draft bill envisaging criminal liability for complying with Western sanctions.
The European Parliament approved the revised draft of a new Regulation aiming to overcome obstacles that cross-border e-commerce customers are faced with.
In an opinion issued on 22 November 2017, EU-the Advocate General confirmed that the EU competition law provisions do not apply to companies that are part of the same corporate group. However, assurances from those companies might be necessary in case of simultaneous participation in public tendering process in order to protect the free and fair competition between all tenderers.
The EU has proposed a new EU framework for screening foreign investment that raises security or public order concerns for the EU or its Member States.
On 28 June 2017, the German telecommunications regulator decided to suspend enforcement of the provisions of the German Telecommunications Act which required providers of publicly available telephone services for end users and providers of publicly available internet access services for end users to retain certain metadata from 1 July 2017 onwards.
Following the start of negotiations between the United Kingdom and the remaining 27 EU Member States, there are two new Brexit-related publications which will be of interest to those manufacturing or selling products on the UK and EU-27 markets.
On 24 January 2017, the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade approved the the Conflict Minerals Regulation. This paves the way for the text to be formally adopted by the EU institutions in the coming months.
Eturas runs the e-commerce back-end of 30 travel agents in Lithuania. An administrator message to each member informed them that the e-commerce functionality allowing each travel agent to grant discounts would be capped at 3 per cent. That message appeared in part of the system relating to information messages. The Court of Justice found that administrator messages could be the basis of illegal cartel type conduct.
On January 25, 2017, the U.S. President signed an Executive Order on “Enhancing Public Safety in the Interior of the United States” containing rules for government privacy policies pertaining to foreigners. This caused concerns in Europe, but should not affect the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield.