The principle
The same right in 27 countries
That is the promise of this site, and it rests on a technical distinction almost nobody knows: the one between a Regulation and a Directive.
A Regulation applies as it stands, everywhere
A Regulation of the European Union is directly applicable in every member state: it enters each country's law without being rewritten, with the same words, the same amounts and the same time limits. Nobody translates it into national law, nobody adapts it. Regulation (EC) No 261/2004 on air passengers sets €250, €400 and €600: those three numbers are the same from Dublin to Nicosia.
That is what makes a site like this one possible. A situation built on a Regulation can speak to four hundred million people without misleading a single one.
A Directive works differently: it sets a result to be achieved, and each country writes its own law to get there. It must reach the minimum; it may do better. The legal guarantee of conformity, for instance, rests on a Directive: everywhere in the Union the seller is liable for defects for at least two years, and some countries go further.
Two instruments, two ways of reading this site
| Regulation | Directive | |
|---|---|---|
| What it does | Applies directly, with no national rewriting | Sets a result each country must reach through its own law |
| Across the 27 countries | The same text, word for word | The same minimum, different laws |
| What this site teaches | The text, with its amounts and time limits | The minimum baseline only, announced as such |
| The wording used | “The Regulation provides…” | “Everywhere in the Union, at a minimum…” |
An accepted consequence: your country may well do better than what this site says. We will not say so, because we could only say it for one country at a time, and that is not this resource's job. For the law of your country, the national body and the European Consumer Centre are the right doors.
The texts the 6 families rest on
Why no national variant appears here
A resource that mixed the European baseline with the peculiarities of one country would become false the moment it was read somewhere else. And this site is, by design, read from anywhere in the Union. So the rule is hard: no national provision, no fine-grained case law, no “where I live it is better than that”.
This limit is also what makes the site checkable. Every statement points to a text published in the Official Journal of the European Union, or to an official Your Europe page, and the exact extract is copied next to it.