Cofidis SA v Jean-Louis Fredout.
Date: 2002-11-21
20 In this respect, it is settled case-law that, in the context of the cooperation between the Court of Justice and the national courts provided for by Article 234 EC, it is solely for the national court before which the dispute has been brought, and which must assume responsibility for the subsequent judicial decision, to determine in the light of the particular circumstances of the case both the need for a preliminary ruling in order to enable it to deliver judgment and the relevance of the questions which it submits to the Court. A request from a national court may be dismissed only where it is obvious that the interpretation of Community law or the consideration of the validity of a Community rule requested by that court has no bearing on the real situation or on the subject-matter of the case (see, inter alia, Case C-318/98 Fornasar and Others [2000] ECR I-4785, paragraph 27, and Joined Cases C-223/99 and C-260/99 Agorà and Excelsior [2001] ECR I-3605, paragraphs 18 and 20).
32 It must be noted that the Court ruled in paragraph 28 of Océano Grupo Editorial and Salvat Editores that the court's power to determine of its own motion whether a term is unfair constitutes a means both of achieving the result sought by Article 6 of the Directive, namely preventing an individual consumer from being bound by an unfair term, and of contributing to achieving the aim of Article 7, since if the court undertakes such an examination, that may act as a deterrent and contribute to preventing unfair terms in contracts concluded between consumers and sellers or suppliers.
33 That power of the court has been regarded as necessary for ensuring that the consumer enjoys effective protection, in view in particular of the real risk that he is unaware of his rights or encounters difficulties in enforcing them (Océano Grupo Editorial and Salvat Editores, paragraph 26).
34 The protection which the Directive confers on consumers thus extends to cases in which a consumer who has concluded with a seller or supplier a contract containing an unfair term fails to raise the unfair nature of the term, whether because he is unaware of his rights or because he is deterred from enforcing them on account of the costs which judicial proceedings would involve.
35 It is therefore apparent that, in proceedings aimed at the enforcement of unfair terms brought by sellers or suppliers against consumers, the fixing of a time-limit on the court's power to set aside such terms, of its own motion or following a plea raised by the consumer, is liable to affect the effectiveness of the protection intended by Articles 6 and 7 of the Directive. To deprive consumers of the benefit of that protection, sellers or suppliers would merely have to wait until the expiry of the time-limit fixed by the national legislature before seeking enforcement of the unfair terms they would continue to use in contracts.
37 That interpretation is not contradicted by the fact that, as Cofidis and the French Government submit, the Court has on several occasions ruled that limitation periods shorter than that at issue in the main proceedings are not incompatible with the protection of rights conferred on individuals by Community law (Rewe and Palmisani). It need only be pointed out that each case which raises the question whether a national procedural provision renders application of Community law impossible or excessively difficult must be analysed by reference to the role of that provision in the procedure, its progress and its special features, viewed as a whole, before the various national instances (Case C-312/93 Peterbroeck [1995] ECR I-4599, paragraph 14). The Rewe and Palmisani decisions cited by Cofidis and the French Government are thus merely the result of assessments on a case by case basis, taking account of each case's own factual and legal context as a whole, which cannot be applied mechanically in fields other than those in which they were made.
38 In those circumstances, the answer to the national court's question must be that the protection conferred on consumers by the Directive precludes a national provision which, in proceedings brought by a seller or supplier against a consumer on the basis of a contract concluded between them, prohibits the national court, on expiry of a limitation period, from finding, of its own motion or following a plea raised by the consumer, that a term of the contract is unfair.