63 Improving the existing and future acquis: model rules

The DCFR is intended to help in this process of improving the existing acquis and in drafting any future EU legislation in the field of private law. By teasing out and stating clearly the principles that underlie the acquis, the DCFR can show how the existing Directives can be made more consistent and how various sectoral provisions might be given a wider application, so as to eliminate current gaps and overlaps — the ‘horizontal approach’ referred to in the draft proposal. (For instance the DCFR provides for general model rules on pre-contractual information duties and withdrawal rights, which are also the subject of the draft horizontal directive, though this, unlike the DCFR, mainly leaves it to the national laws to determine the consequences of any breach of information duties. The DCFR offers both the EC legislator and the national legislators a model set of sanctions for breach of information duties.) The DCFR also seeks to identify improvements in substance that might be considered. The research preparing the DCFR ‘will aim to identify best solutions, taking into account national contract laws (both case law and established practice), the EC acquis and relevant international instruments, particularly the UN Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods of 1980’.45. The DCFR therefore provides recommendations, based on extensive comparative research and careful analysis, of what should be considered if legislators are minded to alter or add to EU legislation within the broad framework of existing basic assumptions. The DCFR does not challenge these basic assumptions of the acquis (such as the efficacy of information duties or the value of the notion of the consumer as a basis for providing necessary protection) any more than shared propositions of national law. It would not have been appropriate for a group of academic lawyers in an exercise of this nature to do so: these are fundamental and politically sensitive questions which are not primarily of a legal nature. The DCFR simply makes proposals as to how, given the present policy assumptions, the relevant rules might with advantage be modified and made more coherent. In a very few cases it is proposed that, as has been done in some Member States, particular acquis rules applying to consumers should be applied more generally. We do not of course suggest that even those proposals should simply be adopted without further debate. They are no more than model rules from which the legislator and other interested parties may draw inspiration.