by Jean Lukaz MIH,MTS
To say that government is not serious about Consumer Protection is tautology. To fathom that Consumer Protection Laws are a palliative for consumer problems is tautology. To state categorically that Consumer Protection Laws are the disease of the cure is tautology. To contemplate that Consumer Protection Laws are a panacea for consumer problems is tantamount to condoning fraud…and standards are not a topical anaesthesia for surgical equity in the marketplace but rather a bitter pill for both unethical businesses and irresponsible consumers to swallow in order to heal them from within.
In the second episode of the first of his four lectures of the 2012 BBC Reith Lectures entitled “The Human Hive: the Rule of Law and its Enemies,” Professor Niall Ferguson, an economic historian, professor of history at Harvard, and a fellow of Jesus College, Oxford, makes a number of observations regarding consumer protection, which the writer shares.
In his discourse, Niall Fergusson identified 'misconceived regulation' and the 'failure to apply regulation and the law' as one of the troubling aspects of Consumer Protection. All the detailed regulation in the world would not do much to solve consumer problems unless the immediacy of enforcement presents a ‘clear and present danger’ to unscrupulous businessmen and unethical businesses.
Infinitesimal Consumers
Just within the month of June 2012 the confidence of a physically challenged was shaken at the court of law in Ghana when the very presiding judge ruling on his case came in pomp, éclat and plaudit to set him aside up the staircase for His Majesty’s passage to the second floor courtroom. The judge’s cortege of police officers and court clerks bawled at this poor victim, a consumer of the Disability Law, to give way to His Majesty without the exercise of any humility, compassion and mercy on the practically useless Disability Law in this case. If the courtroom, where the law is served to consumers is not disabled-friendly, what is the usefulness of the effect of the Disability Act? This poor consumer wished ‘His Majesty’s pomp was brought down to the grave, and the noise of His viols:…that the worm was spread under Him, and the worms covered Him’[Isa 14:11 KJV].
Darwinian Economy
The much delayed Consumer Protection Bill, however yet to be conceived, has given much utopian expectancy to Ghanaian consumers in spite of the weak institutional regulation of the already existing laws. Given that we are in an ‘Election Year,’ the most unpopular government achievement would be to promulgate a Consumer Protection Law that could tighten up businesses, which in no doubt covertly sponsor politics and political parties. The consequential result will end in these businesses tightening up their political sponsorship and, practically, no government would wish to be the hero in this consumer epic, irrespective of political leaning.
That is not to say that it is inconsistent to suppose that consumers cannot have laws and rights in their favour. If the Hobbesian world dictates that law picks on rights [which are based on personal or civil liberties] and commands them, then where the law does not pick on rights the latter could have a problem with enforcement in law. That is to say that consumer protection laws that are not derived from basic consumer rights render consumer rights as mere consumer liberties, natural or moral as they may appear. Businesses may promote their rights in competition laws but at the same time seek their liberties when it comes to consumer protection laws. To recapitulate Thomas Hobbes, Consumer Rights are not Consumer Protection Laws. Consumer Protection Laws impose duties and responsibilities on businesses and the government while being preventive, whereby, they protect consumers from deception and fraud. If businesses fear the impact of rights-based consumer protection laws they will have the propensity to stall any processes intended to promote consumer protection legislation.
Consumer Liberties
If the rule of law, a state of order in which events conform to the law is paramount to the protection of consumers, perceiving consumer rights as akin to property rights that can be bought and sold is a no brainer. Whether the rule of property (property rights) or the rule of lawyers (rule of law) prevails, consumer rights are irrevocably not negotiable instruments subject to regulated or free market trading. Alluding to the rule of property is to swing between Karl Marx’s ‘Capital’ and Hernando de Soto’s ‘Mystery of Capital’. If rights are considered only within the context of positive rights as recognized within municipal or international legal systems, then they are premised on the rule of law from whence lawyers are premised on rights defence, according to Niall Fergusson. Consumer rights then are premised on rights defence. Thus, if consumer protection laws are not formulated on the basis of consumer rights giving grounds for their defence in a court of law, consumers, consumer rights and consumer protection laws will become an entertaining circus of clowns, tamed animals and fleeting illusionism.
Dinosaur Businesses & Regulatory Expropriation
The most important and cardinal of consumer rights border on basic needs such as water, electricity, public transportation, telecommunications, access to finance and credit, are in majority monopolized by companies with a lion’s share of state ownership that are apt to err with a political veil and a duplicity of unapprehensive state regulation in the financial sector. In the case of water and electricity, at least, without regard to the law of unintended consequences, the Managing Director could publicly boast of consumers’ inability to obtain redress from the courts of law. Consumers, eventually, are the beasts of burden and the victims that bear their leaven of waste and inefficiency on their consumer monthly bills.
In their frustration, consumers and their attempts at accumulating capital as would-be entrepreneurs could be as revolutionary as the trigger of the ‘Arab Spring’ against such injustice and consumer-unfriendly rent-seeking capitalist government-majority companies: “26-year-old Tarek Mohamed Bouazizi, burned himself to death in front of the governor’s offices in the town of Sidi Bouzid last December 2010, precisely an hour after a policewoman, backed by two municipal officers, had confiscated his only capital: two crates of pears, a crate of bananas, three crates of apples and a second-hand electronic weight scale worth around $180. His self-immolation sparked a revolution.”
Consumer Protection in Ghana is, eventually, becoming an enemy of the rule of law.
The Jungle
Consumer Rights under the law of nature may be rather personal liberties. Consumer rights are not naturally endowed as to constitute an inherent enforceability. It is undeniable that consumers in any society are born free and endowed with natural rights. The unscrupulous businessman is also born free just as corrupt enforcement officers of weak regulatory institutions and they all have rights endowed by nature. The right of choice, for example, was given man from creation with a caveat: the right to choose good or evil. Man by nature, endowed with rights but free to choose, broke the law meant to protect him from making the wrong choices. If natural moral laws were enough for the self-preservation of consumers there would be no need for consumer protection laws, a reflection of God’s commandment to the first man “And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: (17) But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die [Gen 2:16-17 KJV].” If this should be deemed natural law as deriving from natural rights, then natural laws are meant to institutionalize natural rights. A free-born consumer endowed with natural rights will not live to see the force of these rights under the Rule of Law. This means that enforcement of rights as privileges is only possible when there are rights-based laws to go with them. But laws of nature do find their place in consumer protection but not explicitly reflected in the globally accepted consumer rights.
Consumer Education rather constitutes self-preservation without the influence of government or peer pressure from civil society than ‘objective-social-collectivist’ rights. However, some consumer rights are constitutional in that government has a responsibility to provide, for example, basic needs to her citizens, who are consumers of public goods and services. The Constitution, some believe, does not reinvent the wheel but rather turns it as Sarah Palin – neither philosopher nor theorist -- muses: “The Constitution didn’t give us our rights. Our rights came from God, and they’re inalienable. The Constitution created a national government to protect our God-given, unalienable rights.” Nevertheless, consumer rights are unenforceable in law unless backed by consumer protection laws. A worst case is consumer rights in international relations and international law, where industry (businesses) refuse to accept the existence of such rights if they are not explicitly backed by international law, another version of Ayn Rand’s circular theory of ‘objective-social-collectivist’ rights.
Wednesday, August 1, 2012
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Ghana: Thick-Skin Consumer Protection
By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS
Where there is no consumer protection law, it does not really make a difference when you are living in the jungle. In such an evolutionary environment in nature’s farm, everyone develops a thick skin: from the elephant to the cockerel to the umbrella tree and even to the eagle.
In a dog-eat-dog world, consumers in the Third World and in some advanced countries are only protected by their own immune systems other than external Machiavellian forces that only militate against them in the end.
What is Consumer Protection in the absence of a backing law and self-motivated civil society organizations?
In Platonic and Machiavellian terms, having the appearance of Consumer Protection than the reality of its existence in the manifestation of laws and institutions and the apprehension thereof has become the present predicament of Ghana and Ghanaian consumers. Weak government institutions and the semblance of regulatory enforcement and their reality as lame ducks have become the enemies of both Consumer Protection and the rule of law.
Anyone used to mosquito bites is likely to be living in a developing country. In the same manner consumers that are exposed to most consumer problems are dwellers of developing countries, most likely to be citizens of a utopian Consumers’ Commonwealth for the Anglophones and anglophiles or a politically assimilated DOM-TOMs, for the Francophones, including francophiles.
Let us do some scuba diving by making a naïve observation of the naked perambulating ‘traditional madman’ in Ghana, who is discarded by psychiatry, that prowl the cities reclaiming the streets, excepting the environs of the heavily guarded ghost haunted Fortress Ghana that is ironically fully exposed on Google Earth considering that even Diplomatic Missions have been heavily smudged beyond detection and their coordinates undeclared.
Our traditional madman, like the moon, goes round and comes around in many forms: sometimes as a consumer, sometimes as a manufacturer, wholesaler, seller or service provider and at times as the government.
In retrospect, Consumer Protection has evolved in all forms in Ghana: sometimes in the form of political persecution or public scourging in the name of ‘Kalabule’ [consumer rip-off], or price control laws in a quasi-communist milit-o-cracy determined by Machiavellian ‘armed prophecy’.
Given this status quo, Ghanaian consumers have been anaesthetised by rhetoric, breakdown in the rule of law, deceptive appearances and empty pre-election promises ever unfulfilled.
The aforementioned traditional madman sleeps in the streets in rain or shine, fully exposed to the capricious elements and most importantly, to zillions mosquito bites yet he hardly contracts malaria. Is it because he has become immune to the bites of this minuscule vampire bearing leviathan parasites of political lies and unscrupulous business exploitation or is it because malaria is only a condition of the mind far from a disease?
Whether in limbo or out on a limb the Ghanaian consumer, it appears, has developed a thick skin. After all, regulatory enforcement institutions can be simulated as distinguished consorts of unscrupulous businesses. To put your faith in them ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite:…’ [Isa 29:8 KJV].
To cry ‘Consumer Protection’ is all a vexation of the spirit and a chase after the wind, a Hobbesian attitude to life as a consumer in ‘the state of nature,’ in the absence of authority and the law:
“…think about how you behave: when going on a journey, you arm yourself, and try not to go alone; when going to sleep, you lock your doors; even inside your own house you lock your chests; and you do all this when you know that there are laws, and armed public officers of the law, to revenge any harms that are done to you. Ask yourself: what opinion do you have of your fellow subjects when you ride armed? Of your fellow citizens when you lock your doors? Of your children and servants when you lock your chests? In all this, don’t you accuse mankind as much by your actions as I do by my words? Actually, neither of us is criticizing man’s nature. The desires and other passions of men aren’t sinful in themselves. Nor are actions that come from those passions, until those who act know a law that forbids them; they can’t know this until laws are made; and they can’t be made until men agree on the person who is to make them. But why try to demonstrate to learned men something that is known even to dogs who bark at visitors—sometimes indeed only at strangers but in the night at everyone?” [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, ‘The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery’]
Where there is no consumer protection law, it does not really make a difference when you are living in the jungle. In such an evolutionary environment in nature’s farm, everyone develops a thick skin: from the elephant to the cockerel to the umbrella tree and even to the eagle.
In a dog-eat-dog world, consumers in the Third World and in some advanced countries are only protected by their own immune systems other than external Machiavellian forces that only militate against them in the end.
What is Consumer Protection in the absence of a backing law and self-motivated civil society organizations?
In Platonic and Machiavellian terms, having the appearance of Consumer Protection than the reality of its existence in the manifestation of laws and institutions and the apprehension thereof has become the present predicament of Ghana and Ghanaian consumers. Weak government institutions and the semblance of regulatory enforcement and their reality as lame ducks have become the enemies of both Consumer Protection and the rule of law.
Anyone used to mosquito bites is likely to be living in a developing country. In the same manner consumers that are exposed to most consumer problems are dwellers of developing countries, most likely to be citizens of a utopian Consumers’ Commonwealth for the Anglophones and anglophiles or a politically assimilated DOM-TOMs, for the Francophones, including francophiles.
Let us do some scuba diving by making a naïve observation of the naked perambulating ‘traditional madman’ in Ghana, who is discarded by psychiatry, that prowl the cities reclaiming the streets, excepting the environs of the heavily guarded ghost haunted Fortress Ghana that is ironically fully exposed on Google Earth considering that even Diplomatic Missions have been heavily smudged beyond detection and their coordinates undeclared.
Our traditional madman, like the moon, goes round and comes around in many forms: sometimes as a consumer, sometimes as a manufacturer, wholesaler, seller or service provider and at times as the government.
In retrospect, Consumer Protection has evolved in all forms in Ghana: sometimes in the form of political persecution or public scourging in the name of ‘Kalabule’ [consumer rip-off], or price control laws in a quasi-communist milit-o-cracy determined by Machiavellian ‘armed prophecy’.
Given this status quo, Ghanaian consumers have been anaesthetised by rhetoric, breakdown in the rule of law, deceptive appearances and empty pre-election promises ever unfulfilled.
The aforementioned traditional madman sleeps in the streets in rain or shine, fully exposed to the capricious elements and most importantly, to zillions mosquito bites yet he hardly contracts malaria. Is it because he has become immune to the bites of this minuscule vampire bearing leviathan parasites of political lies and unscrupulous business exploitation or is it because malaria is only a condition of the mind far from a disease?
Whether in limbo or out on a limb the Ghanaian consumer, it appears, has developed a thick skin. After all, regulatory enforcement institutions can be simulated as distinguished consorts of unscrupulous businesses. To put your faith in them ‘It shall even be as when an hungry man dreameth, and, behold, he eateth; but he awaketh, and his soul is empty: or as when a thirsty man dreameth, and, behold, he drinketh; but he awaketh, and, behold, he is faint, and his soul hath appetite:…’ [Isa 29:8 KJV].
To cry ‘Consumer Protection’ is all a vexation of the spirit and a chase after the wind, a Hobbesian attitude to life as a consumer in ‘the state of nature,’ in the absence of authority and the law:
“…think about how you behave: when going on a journey, you arm yourself, and try not to go alone; when going to sleep, you lock your doors; even inside your own house you lock your chests; and you do all this when you know that there are laws, and armed public officers of the law, to revenge any harms that are done to you. Ask yourself: what opinion do you have of your fellow subjects when you ride armed? Of your fellow citizens when you lock your doors? Of your children and servants when you lock your chests? In all this, don’t you accuse mankind as much by your actions as I do by my words? Actually, neither of us is criticizing man’s nature. The desires and other passions of men aren’t sinful in themselves. Nor are actions that come from those passions, until those who act know a law that forbids them; they can’t know this until laws are made; and they can’t be made until men agree on the person who is to make them. But why try to demonstrate to learned men something that is known even to dogs who bark at visitors—sometimes indeed only at strangers but in the night at everyone?” [Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, XIII, ‘The natural condition of mankind as concerning their happiness and misery’]
Monday, April 30, 2012
Consumer Groups in Ghana Pledge a Unified Front
At the just-ended ISO-COPOLCO workshop in Accra on ‘Consumer Participation in Standardization’, the Consumer Movement set an objective that they believe will give Ghanaian consumers the boost of a unified front.
The consumer organizations present included The Consumer Partnership, Consumer Advocacy Center, International Center for Consumer Issues and Advocacy, Consumer Protection Agency, Consumers Association of Ghana and a Public Interest Law Organization.
The objective was to form a Federation of Ghanaian Consumers, Consumer Advocates and Consumer Organizations as an umbrella body with the core function of crystallizing consumer opinion through advocacy, research, lobbying and consumer education.
Commenting on the proposal, Jean Lukaz, the National Expert in Consumer Issues in Standardization, indicated that this move was long overdue as it was last proposed in 2007 but leaders of Consumer Organizations present at the time did not express any interest in it for fear of losing control over their organizational spheres of influence. On the other hand, others had felt intimidated by the need for transparency that may be required by virtue of their membership of a federation.
The present proposal was unanimously accepted and a maiden meeting was to be arranged to discuss and approve of the declarations, objectives and constitution of the newly proposed Federation and elect executives to lead it.
It also came to light that consumer organizations could not seek business sponsorship nor receive financial assistance from political parties. Even government sponsorship of consumer organizations need to be scrutinized if it is foreseeable that the latter may later seek to influence their activities.
Sunday, March 11, 2012
My Warranty Experience@Compu-Ghana
By Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS
After a colleague was ripped off at AFTECH Computers in Accra and managed to get his money back, a comparative shopping exercise finally landed us at Compu-Ghana. This was after we had made a trial run to Starlite Computers and Dealer Computers, both at Osu. The wet paint on the wall of the staircase at Dealer Computers warned me after a stain in my suit, the only sure notice of opening hours painting. A soft-spoken boss named Ahmed could only apologise and infuriate us at the same time by showing us a similar stain in his shirt by way of asking us to shut up. Well, someone else deserved our cash of GH¢1,500.00 so we voted with our feet. He only reminded us of the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s comic character.
It appeared that Compu-Ghana had more to offer in terms of choice and budget. All was well till we were asked to pay for the Intel i5 Toshiba Satellite laptop, then the trigger of events began. When we asked to see what we were paying for to be sure, the sales folk were bewildered by the two gentlemen in suits that seemed to know their rights more than the rest of their clients. Why consumers are required to pay for their laptop while it is being removed from some warehouse is a case of ‘buying a pig in a poke’. A young gentleman later on appeared with a packaging in his arms, ‘Here you are, Sirs.’ And how do we know it is what we selected? The receipt only bore the code of the Toshiba Satellite Laptop without the specifications. I could not be bothered as my next move was to ask them to switch the machine on so we could verify the specs.
The answer actually required a trip to the Compu-Ghana Service Center located in the backyard. The reason for the trip was actually for software to be installed without our prior consent and not to answer our prying consumer savvy. The boss of the Service Centre treats every suit-bearing consumer as naïve and you could not blame her for that though. She has acquired her attitude through experience. She hastily filled in a Warranty Card for us to sign expecting some excitement from our end for their after-sales ‘irresponsibilities’.
Having chaired the ISO-COPOLCO Task Group on Warranties, I had just been given my favourite horse to ride. In fact, the Warranty Card of Compu-Ghana is a self-inflicting wound and tantamount to an unjust law and an unconscionable contract: it offers no warranty at all! What freaked me out was a clause dubbed ‘DOA’ [Dead On Arrival]—it reminded me of the morgue and the Death Certificates they issue to relatives of the deceased.
Wherever Compu-Ghana copied their warranty card details from, it was certainly not drafted by an expert. They have a new vocabulary ‘warranttee’ that requires certification, probably by the Ghana Standards Authority. The following Compu-Ghana-branded items were found in the non-biodegradable carrier bag:
1. a laptop bag,
2. a 2GB flash drive,
3. a mouse with retractable cable and
4. a rent-a-Skype headset.
However, clause 13 of their ‘warrantee’ does not cover any of these ‘gifts’. Clause 14 does not cover problems related to the software they installed at the Service Center but the consumer is not alerted to that for their prior consent. The Service Center staff asked if she could dispose of the card box packaging but when I inquired whether the very packaging will be required for claims against warranty her answer was affirmative.
It also appears that an unlimited warranty too-good-to-be-true is always a rip-off in disguise…ask AFTECH Computers!
After a colleague was ripped off at AFTECH Computers in Accra and managed to get his money back, a comparative shopping exercise finally landed us at Compu-Ghana. This was after we had made a trial run to Starlite Computers and Dealer Computers, both at Osu. The wet paint on the wall of the staircase at Dealer Computers warned me after a stain in my suit, the only sure notice of opening hours painting. A soft-spoken boss named Ahmed could only apologise and infuriate us at the same time by showing us a similar stain in his shirt by way of asking us to shut up. Well, someone else deserved our cash of GH¢1,500.00 so we voted with our feet. He only reminded us of the ventriloquist Jeff Dunham’s comic character.
It appeared that Compu-Ghana had more to offer in terms of choice and budget. All was well till we were asked to pay for the Intel i5 Toshiba Satellite laptop, then the trigger of events began. When we asked to see what we were paying for to be sure, the sales folk were bewildered by the two gentlemen in suits that seemed to know their rights more than the rest of their clients. Why consumers are required to pay for their laptop while it is being removed from some warehouse is a case of ‘buying a pig in a poke’. A young gentleman later on appeared with a packaging in his arms, ‘Here you are, Sirs.’ And how do we know it is what we selected? The receipt only bore the code of the Toshiba Satellite Laptop without the specifications. I could not be bothered as my next move was to ask them to switch the machine on so we could verify the specs.
The answer actually required a trip to the Compu-Ghana Service Center located in the backyard. The reason for the trip was actually for software to be installed without our prior consent and not to answer our prying consumer savvy. The boss of the Service Centre treats every suit-bearing consumer as naïve and you could not blame her for that though. She has acquired her attitude through experience. She hastily filled in a Warranty Card for us to sign expecting some excitement from our end for their after-sales ‘irresponsibilities’.
Having chaired the ISO-COPOLCO Task Group on Warranties, I had just been given my favourite horse to ride. In fact, the Warranty Card of Compu-Ghana is a self-inflicting wound and tantamount to an unjust law and an unconscionable contract: it offers no warranty at all! What freaked me out was a clause dubbed ‘DOA’ [Dead On Arrival]—it reminded me of the morgue and the Death Certificates they issue to relatives of the deceased.
Wherever Compu-Ghana copied their warranty card details from, it was certainly not drafted by an expert. They have a new vocabulary ‘warranttee’ that requires certification, probably by the Ghana Standards Authority. The following Compu-Ghana-branded items were found in the non-biodegradable carrier bag:
1. a laptop bag,
2. a 2GB flash drive,
3. a mouse with retractable cable and
4. a rent-a-Skype headset.
However, clause 13 of their ‘warrantee’ does not cover any of these ‘gifts’. Clause 14 does not cover problems related to the software they installed at the Service Center but the consumer is not alerted to that for their prior consent. The Service Center staff asked if she could dispose of the card box packaging but when I inquired whether the very packaging will be required for claims against warranty her answer was affirmative.
It also appears that an unlimited warranty too-good-to-be-true is always a rip-off in disguise…ask AFTECH Computers!
Thursday, February 23, 2012
Is there such a thing as Consumer Rights in Ghana?
by Jean Lukaz MIH, MTS
Never had I felt so stupid as a consumer advocate than the day the theory of ‘consumer rights’ was challenged at a conference for the fact that it lacked any legal basis in international law and in international relations. It occurred to me that either the consumer movement had got it wrong all this while or someone was wielding a powerful drilling tool, thereby reducing the issue of consumer rights to a complete nonsense upon stilts.
The ‘consumer movement’ went to work immediately to debunk this argument by extracting from UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection, ILO provisions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, which are all not legally binding documents in international law.
The moment the latter, bearing both first- and second-generation rights, was being translated into legally binding obligations, it was split into two separate treaties in 1966 [ratified in 1976] reflecting political and economic rights into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The first of the treaties, being political in nature, consists merely of first-generation rights that did not require any resources to be provided for consumers to be able to enjoy them. The second treaty, second-generation in nature, bore less developed enforcement mechanisms for rights that cannot be guaranteed. These economic and social rights (second-generation rights) seemed to be blurring off in the business argument until the consumer movement attached governments as constituents of the Social Responsibility Standard, ISO 22000.
These second-generation rights rather require the allocation or redistribution of resources and very often are not enshrined in state constitutions for fear of opening the floodgates to consumers. Only Communist Manifestos and Communist Constitutions go that far in enshrining social and economic rights. So what happened?
The ISO Standard on Social responsibility (ISO 22000) was opening the floodgates for businesses to return to their thrones of ‘Caveat Emptor’. Strictly speaking, industry was invoking an old theoretical argument on the derivation of rights that suppose that the only proper use of the word ‘rights’ must be in relation to legal rights. In a like manner, they were asking Paul, the Apostle, to turn in his grave and rephrase some of his to ‘O consumer, where is thy sting?’
Burying my head into the question of rights led me to the issues of sovereignty, liberties, privileges, immunities and the ‘non-existent Constitutional Rights’ of consumers, a.k.a. consumer sovereignty.
• What is a consumer right if it does not impose duty on others and thereby making it less protected than it should be?
• What is a consumer right if it does not create liability in others?
• What is a consumer right if it does not grant immunity to consumers from being deprived of the essentials of life and tools of their trade upon which their very survival depend?
• What is a consumer right if it is all about liberties that are restricted by other right holders?
• What is a consumer right if the sovereignty of consumers is surrendered by their adhesion contract of citizenship that only guarantees them civil liberties as designed at will by the state at any point in time?
• What is a consumer right if none is wrong when they interfere with or restrict the exercise of it thereof?
• What is a consumer right if its application to the individual is restrained by advancing utilitarian arguments such as promoting the welfare of the majority?
• What is a consumer right if it is not a political, socio-economic or collective right?
• What is a consumer right if has no associated responsibility in the exercise of it thereof?
Never had I felt so stupid as a consumer advocate than the day the theory of ‘consumer rights’ was challenged at a conference for the fact that it lacked any legal basis in international law and in international relations. It occurred to me that either the consumer movement had got it wrong all this while or someone was wielding a powerful drilling tool, thereby reducing the issue of consumer rights to a complete nonsense upon stilts.
The ‘consumer movement’ went to work immediately to debunk this argument by extracting from UN Guidelines on Consumer Protection, ILO provisions and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights 1948, which are all not legally binding documents in international law.
The moment the latter, bearing both first- and second-generation rights, was being translated into legally binding obligations, it was split into two separate treaties in 1966 [ratified in 1976] reflecting political and economic rights into the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR). The first of the treaties, being political in nature, consists merely of first-generation rights that did not require any resources to be provided for consumers to be able to enjoy them. The second treaty, second-generation in nature, bore less developed enforcement mechanisms for rights that cannot be guaranteed. These economic and social rights (second-generation rights) seemed to be blurring off in the business argument until the consumer movement attached governments as constituents of the Social Responsibility Standard, ISO 22000.
These second-generation rights rather require the allocation or redistribution of resources and very often are not enshrined in state constitutions for fear of opening the floodgates to consumers. Only Communist Manifestos and Communist Constitutions go that far in enshrining social and economic rights. So what happened?
The ISO Standard on Social responsibility (ISO 22000) was opening the floodgates for businesses to return to their thrones of ‘Caveat Emptor’. Strictly speaking, industry was invoking an old theoretical argument on the derivation of rights that suppose that the only proper use of the word ‘rights’ must be in relation to legal rights. In a like manner, they were asking Paul, the Apostle, to turn in his grave and rephrase some of his to ‘O consumer, where is thy sting?’
Burying my head into the question of rights led me to the issues of sovereignty, liberties, privileges, immunities and the ‘non-existent Constitutional Rights’ of consumers, a.k.a. consumer sovereignty.
• What is a consumer right if it does not impose duty on others and thereby making it less protected than it should be?
• What is a consumer right if it does not create liability in others?
• What is a consumer right if it does not grant immunity to consumers from being deprived of the essentials of life and tools of their trade upon which their very survival depend?
• What is a consumer right if it is all about liberties that are restricted by other right holders?
• What is a consumer right if the sovereignty of consumers is surrendered by their adhesion contract of citizenship that only guarantees them civil liberties as designed at will by the state at any point in time?
• What is a consumer right if none is wrong when they interfere with or restrict the exercise of it thereof?
• What is a consumer right if its application to the individual is restrained by advancing utilitarian arguments such as promoting the welfare of the majority?
• What is a consumer right if it is not a political, socio-economic or collective right?
• What is a consumer right if has no associated responsibility in the exercise of it thereof?
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