Public petition n°4238

Petitioner: Max Schmit

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The purpose of this petition is to strengthen consumer rights in Luxembourg by introducing into the Consumer Code a strict principle of contractual and financial reciprocity vis-à-vis businesses and professionals (specifically across the banking, insurance, telecommunications, energy, and e-commerce sectors). The objective is to grant users and consumers the legal authority to charge standard administrative/handling fees or obtain automatic, regulated compensation when a persistent technical malfunction, digital interface outage, or processing failure attributable to the service provider forces the user to perform time-consuming manual procedures to fulfill contractual obligations or assert their rights. The petition also calls for the mandatory, automatic waiver of all ancillary fees, reminder costs, or penalties claimed by a provider whenever a delay or complication stems from an outage or bug in its own digital systems.

The increasing digitization of essential services obliges citizens to rely exclusively on digital interfaces (customer portals, mobile applications, online forms). While this automation enables businesses to achieve significant economies of scale, it creates a structural imbalance to the detriment of users during technical failures. A major legal and financial asymmetry currently exists between businesses and consumers: * Imbalance of financial penalties: Service providers systematically levy penalty charges, reminder fees, or administrative processing costs for the slightest customer delay or omission, while consumers possess no reciprocal mechanism to recover the time and resources expended dealing with provider-side disruptions. * Undue shifting of the administrative burden: When an online portal becomes inaccessible or defective, the operational workload is systematically offloaded onto the citizen. Users are forced to undertake multiple workaround steps (letters, phone calls, email follow-ups) to prevent financial or administrative deadlocks, without any practical means of recovering their losses short of disproportionately costly legal action. * Public interest and collective protection: Restoring symmetry in contractual obligations is an issue of equity and economic public policy. Establishing a statutory compensation framework incentivizes companies to maintain reliable digital infrastructure and customer service quality, while protecting consumers from administrative burdens. Given this mandatory digital transition, guaranteeing that contractual equality operates bidirectionally is a matter of public interest within Luxembourg's legal framework.