Protecting Consumer Rights in Electronic Contracts : a Lessons From European Union and United Kingdom

Abstract

The nature and development of e-commerce cause many changes to the traditional legal conceptions. It has made a significant impact on the traditional role of the consumer as well. As a result, the modern consumer is no longer limited to the offline market but, in contrast, he is more explorative in electronic market platforms. On the one hand, these emerging changes facilitate the sophisticated lifestyle of the consumer. But, on the other hand, it is evident that online consumers are exposing more vulnerabilities in the electronic environment other than the offline consumers. Information disclosure, privacy, lack of system security and dispute resolution are some of the key challenging issues which online consumers have to deal with today. Accordingly, these issues have been addressed in both international and domestic legal systems. Amid, European Union and United Kingdom examples provide more advance mechanisms for protecting consumer rights in electronic contracts. However, in Sri Lankan context, the Consumer Affairs Authority Act or Electronic Transaction Act or any other legislation do not provide any specific protection against the violations of consumer rights in an electronic environment. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate the developments in the European Union and the United Kingdom legal system in the light of online consumer rights protection. Moreover, the findings will be compared with domestic legislative provisions in order to emphasize the lacuna in Sri Lankan consumer law as well as the information technology law regimes. The qualitative research approach used as the main research paradigm of the research.