EP PLENARY ADOPTS REPORT ON ROME I

Brussels, 29 November 2007 - On 29 November the European Parliament adopted its report on the Regulation on the Law applicable to Contractual Obligations, commonly known as the “Rome I Regulation”.

By approving its package of compromise amendments, the European Parliament disarmed those sections of the Commission’s initial proposal that constituted a serious threat to e-commerce, online traders and the internal market at large.
Businesses, in particular small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) depend on the Single European Market (“Single Market”) to conduct trade across its internal borders without facing legal uncertainties.

The Commission proposed to introduce the so-called “Country of Destination principle” for all consumer contracts. Thereby imposing trade obstacles in the form of compliance costs and legal uncertainty to businesses that operate across borders. However, the European Parliament’s compromise solution allows choice of contract law under certain circumstances.

FEDMA, representing the European e-commerce sector, is relieved to see that the European Parliament successfully reintroduced the opportunity for consumers and sellers/businesses to choose the law applicable to contracts.

Alastair Tempest, Director General of FEDMA said “This has been a very hard fought battle, partly because the issues are so legislative that it became difficult to rally supporters. However, the retailers, mail and distance sellers, FEDMA and others have agreed strongly for a solution which would help both on and off-line cross frontier marketing, and we are relieved that the Parliament has reached this solution”.

For more information, please contact Anne Støren at astoren@fedma.org

ENDS

FEDMA
439 Avenue de Tervuren
1150 Brussels, Belgium

PR & Communications Manager: Anne Storen, email: astoren@fedma.org. tel: +32 2 776 03 97

The Federation of European Direct and Interactive Marketing (FEDMA) was created in 1997 as a result of the merger between EDMA (est. 1976) and FEDIM (est. 1992).

FEDMA is the single voice of the European direct marketing industry. Its national members are direct marketing associations (DMAs) representing users, service providers and media/carriers of direct marketing. FEDMA also has more than 200 direct company members.


Today, direct marketing strategies (via mail, telephone, Internet and direct response) are an essential tool for companies to approach, inform and retain customers, as well as providing customer relationship services.

The development of sophisticated databases, telemarketing and e-marketing has made direct marketing increasingly popular as a marketing strategy and has encouraged strong investment. The direct marketing sector represents an annual expenditure of over 100 billion euro and employs over 2 million people directly, and many more indirectly, within the EU.

This release was published on openPR.