Financial Regulation and Private Law Remedies: An EU Law Perspective

Economic regulation at EU level has had a firm bias in favour of a public agency enforcement system. This contribution explores the role of EU law in enhancing private law remedies, such as civil liability, with a particular focus on financial law. It discusses the rights – remedies distinction in EU law, the model of hybridity that characterizes the EU system of rights protection, and attempts a taxonomy of EU measures depending on the extent to which they provide for private law remedies. It then looks at implied rights of action in EU law. It argues that whilst public agency enforcement is a sine qua non for effective compliance, the value of private remedies should be further utilized. The absence of strong private remedies is not the result of a coherent, systematic analysis of the relative merits of public and private enforcement models but dictated by the regulatory bias of the integration paradigm and a reluctance to intervene directly into the national law of obligations.