A. INTRODUCTION
25.101 The consumer protection issue has been studied at length by the federal government. The Constitution contains a variety of provisions dealing with this sensitive subject, invariably upholding consumer rights through actions proposed by the government (especially the Public Prosecutor Office). All such provisions culminated in article 52 of the Interim Provisions of the Constitution, which provided for the drafting of a consumer protection code within 120 days of October 5, 1988.
25.102 Incipient consumer protection principles could be found in Brazilian legal writings and past court rulings. Various sectors in the community, however, increasingly called for a consolidation of such rules.
23.103 The Brazilian Consumer Protection Code was then approved, based on the premise that consumers are the weaker party to increasingly dispersed consumer relations.
25.104 As a rule, consumer relations in Brazil are governed by Law No. 8078 of September 11, 1990, known as the Consumer Protection Code (CDC). Consumer relations entail the production, transformation, assembly, design, construction, import, export, distribution or trading of assets and the rendering of services, including those of banking, financial, credit and securities nature (other than labor), carried out by private or public entities. In short, all activities related to the production and placement of goods and services on the market for further purchase and use by the community in general fall under this criterion.
B. DEFINITIONS
25.105 Consumer relations dealt with in Law 8078/90 are defined by concepts strictly set forth in applicable law.
25.106 Obviously, only consumer relations come under the aegis of the Consumer Protection Code, which does not extend to other relations prescribed and supported by law.
25.107 Consumer relations stand for the legal relationship between the supplier, on the one hand, and the consumer, on the other, for the performance of a service or the marketing of a product. Consumer relations are thus defined by the presence of elements that identify their existence.
25.108 The Brazilian Consumer Protection Code opted for a clear-cut and didactic definition of the elements defining the existence of consumer relations. These elements are set out in articles 2 and 3 of the Code, as follows. It should be mentioned that the Federal Supreme Court has recently ruled that the Consumer Protection Code applies to banking agreements.
