Having realised that the differences between consumer protection regulations in the Member States may result in significant distortion of competition, the European Parliament and the Council adopted an Unfair Commercial Practices Directive in 2005 with the aim of harmonising consumer protection rules in all Member States in order to create uniform and high-level consumer protection in them. The transposition of the directive in Hungary is still in process and the competence of the authorities affected by the directive has not been clarified in all aspects yet, it is, however, already clear that the GVH will participate in the fulfilment of the tasks given by the directive.

Furthermore, the EU has set up a network of European consumer protection authorities; modelled on the European Competition Network (the ECN) the consumer protection network gathers the consumer protection authorities of the Member States. The network addresses only cross-border consumer fraud cases the number of which is increasing in parallel with the development of the integration. In the work of the network, the GVH (as one of the affected Hungarian authorities) takes part by supervising observance of the provisions relating to misleading and comparative advertising.

As to the sources of the law of the European Union we recommend the following two websites:

  • DG COMP (for competition policy related legislation)

  • EUR-Lex (for Community legislation in general)