In her Opinion, communicated by the CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union), Advocate General Ćapeta argued that economic operators have the right to request from the competent authorities that a RAPEX notification be completed, particularly when its incompleteness is likely to impede trade in the safe products it wrongly covers.
In the case before the Court, some firecrackers imported into the EU from China by a Polish company were deemed dangerous by the competent Austrian authorities and were subject to RAPEX notifications.
The importer considered that these notifications did not describe the products correctly and made requests to the authorities to complete the notifications with the batch numbers of the products concerned. The risk for him was that potential distributors would be dissuaded from marketing these products, in the mistaken belief that they were all covered by the notification.
Its requests were refused
Under Austrian law, a company’s access to the Austrian courts to seek judicial review of this rejection is only possible if it has the right to request that a RAPEX notification be completed. This was not the case in the first place.
The Austrian Administrative Court has submitted a request for a preliminary ruling to the CJEU to clarify the relevant EU law.
The Advocate General’s reasoning
Advocate General Ćapeta acknowledged that the RAPEX-relevant EU law has not been designed with the aim of treating economic operators as parties enjoying certain rights within the notification procedure.
However, she proposes to the Court of Justice to find that …
