On 25 November 2020, the European Union adopted one of its more anticipated legal instruments, the first binding legal act to create a European system of collective redress for both injunctive and damages actions. Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions for the protection of consumers' collective interests and repealing Directive 2009/22/EC must be transposed by the Member States of the European Union by 25 December 2022, with effect and application for actions brought on or after 25 June 2023. Due to the complexity of the area of collective actions, many Member States have failed to transpose Directive 2020/1828 in time.
The aim of the master’s thesis is to provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the development of collective actions in the European Union and the relevance of the Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions for the Member States and their legal systems. The master’s thesis starts with an introduction to the development of collective actions at the level of the European Union, followed by an analysis of Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions, together with a presentation of the transposition of selected provisions into the legal systems of the Member States which have notified the European Commission of the transposition of the Directive by 15 June 2023. The provisions of the Member States on the conditions to be met by entities in order to bring internal representative actions, the provisions on the ways in which participants may be included in the procedure, the so-called opt-in or opt-out system and the provisions on the admissibility of third-party funding are presented in more detail. This is followed by an overview of the current Slovenian legal regime for collective redress in the Act on Collective Actions (ZKolT) and a proposal for an amendment to the Act ZKolT-A, which will implement Directive 2020/1828.
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