Transposing the Consumer Protection Acquis at Pre-Membership Stage : Current Candidate States and Other

As new countries queue to join the European Union, the screening and transposition obligations remain on-going phenomena which deserve more academic attention. This paper examines the position of the current candidate countries and traces the progress achieved in the implementation of the various ever-expanding acquis chapter comprising the consumer protection Directives. The position of Turkey, Croatia, the Turkish Cypriot Community, Serbia, and Iceland and the degree and method of their implementation of the consumer Directives is analysed and briefly compared with the implementation of the Directives in Maltese law. The paper places the progress achieved in the various procedures within their particular, often peculiar, political contexts and compares them to the screening and transposition efforts undertaken by Malta on its own road to accession a decade ago. It reflects on the beneficial effect that the EU accession process and the consumer acquis chapter exercise in pushing aspiring new members to introduce significant more consumer rights and remedies for their respective citizens in a relatively briefer period than otherwise would have been the case