Consumer Protection Code celebrates 30 years with new challenges

As of today, the Consumer Protection Code (CDC) celebrates its 30th anniversary, undoubtedly expressing an important contribution to the country’s legal system regarding a normative and axiological framework that restructured consumer relations from the moment of economic opening experienced by the country in the early 1990s when Law No. 8,078 was published.

In these three decades, society has faced great changes, which tend to intensify as new technologies diversify and their use is disseminated among companies and people. Variables that impact and reframe consumer behavior, supplier operations and the business environment itself.

Undoubtedly, this period is also marked by major challenges, especially with regard to the interpretation and application of consumerist norms to factual situations that are renewing themselves more and more quickly, highlighting the essential role of the Superior Court of Justice in the uniformity of jurisprudential understanding. regarding controversies that are recurrent in the country’s judicial bodies.

Interpretive stability is a permanent challenge that must be pursued in the area of ​​consumer law. Evidence of this is the 2019 base year statistics released by the National Council of Justice informing the predominance of issues related to this legal area in the State Justice of the first degree, in the Special Civil Courts and in their Appeals. Equally high are the numbers related to complaints registered in the country’s Procons and the sum of fines imposed by these entities.

Add to this the new scenario that will emerge with the beginning of the LGDP’s term regarding the interpretation of the rules of protection of personal data and privacy in the relations between suppliers of products and services and consumers, especially regarding the possibility granted by LGPD so that the holders of personal data petition in the face of the controllers before the consumer protection agencies.

These aspects highlight the need to expand consensual conflict management, notably conciliation, with the support of Online Dispute Resolution platforms, as an appropriate method in order to contribute to reducing judicialization in this area of ​​law. It is expected, therefore, that in the coming years the search for balance between the business environment and the normative and axiological framework inscribed in consumer legislation will remain.

By: Wilson Sales Belchior