Small in value, important in essence: lessons learnt from a decade of implementing the European Small Claims Procedure in Italy and Belgium

Abstract

This article examines the extent to which the European Small Claims Procedure (ESCP) has served the main purpose of the EU legislature to establish a legal framework to improve access to justice for creditors of cross-border small claims through a simplified, expedited and inexpensive redress mechanism. This article first analyses the implementation of the ESCP in Italy and Belgium. These two countries were chosen because of the authors’ research on the Small Claims Analysis Net (SCAN) Project (The SCAN Project was initiated in 2018 as a two-year project with the fundamental aim of evaluating the efficiency of the European Small Claims Procedure within several EU Member States (France, Belgium, Italy, Slovenia, and Lithuania), besides raising awareness of this procedure among consumers and other judicial stakeholders. For the conducted activities as part of the SCAN project, see http://www.scanproject.eu accessed on 24 February 2021). The second part of this article deals with the impact of this regulatory instrument on access to justice for citizens, in view of the principle of judicial efficiency. Finally, this article focuses on the possibility of using this instrument for collective redress, on the one hand, and linking this procedure to online dispute resolution, on the other.