Study On Consumer Arbitration Merchanism

Consumer's dispute, one kind of civil dispute in essence, has its inherent characteristics. The dispute happen commonly and completely. The parties of the dispute are specially designated and imbalance. The dispute is about consumer's rights or merchant's duty. And there are small amounts in consumer's dispute. In the Law on the Protection of Consumer Right and Interests, there are various methods of solving customer's dispute, which consist of a scientific system. In addition, consumers can solver their dispute by other ways:reconciliation by themselves, conciliation by consumer association, by administration or by court verdict.As an important means of dispute settlement, arbitration appears to offer several advantages:speed, flexibility, confidentiality, reduced costs, the arbiter's expertise, a procedure adapted to the parties'dispute, etc. Many advanced countries, such as America, Europe, Korea, Singapore and Australia have already established consumer arbitration mechanism that is adapted to their own national condition. And they have some valuable experience to enlightened us.In recent years, some provinces and cities of China are attempt to settle customer's dispute in arbitration procedure, and they have some effect. But due to some reasons, there are still some problems in Chinese consumer arbitration mechanism. The arbitration legal principle place restriction on consumer arbitration mechanism. Because of the contradiction between consumers and merchants, they can't make validate arbitration agreement. And the arbitration is more and more expensive because of the arbitration procedure's complicated.So it is need of taking some measures to rapidly improve it in legislation and judicature. This study examines certain arbitration process currently in China, indentifies the pros and cons of consumer arbitration, and proposes a comparative study of consumer arbitration in other countries and Hong Kong, Macau, etc. They have some valuable experience at consumer arbitration. So we should build a valid consumer arbitration mechanism, and this system is adapted to the national condition. Firstly, we should revise the Arbitration Law of China to improve the consumer arbitration law. Secondly,we should make validate to the arbitration agreement and make arbitration mandatory in some cases to ensure it offers consumers adequate protection. Thirdly, we also should recommend the independent expert arbitration committees, notably including consumer representative, law experts, consumer experts and merchants representative. Fourthly, we should establish small-claim arbitration procedure for settling matters in which relatively small amounts are in dispute. Finally, because of the imbalance between consumers and merchants, we should construct the procedure rules which benefit to establish a balance of consumers and merchants.