554 COMPETITION LAW IN TOURISM required the Government to establish “by regulation the name, composition, nature, form of designation and territorial scope of the arbitration bodies and other specialities of the procedure and the legal regime of the arbitration system which provides, in its basic characteristics, Article 31 of Law 26/1984”. As a result of this regulatory imposition, Royal Decree 636/1993 was published, providing in its first Article for the supplementary application of the 1988 Arbitration Law, which would ultimately be replaced by the current Law 60/2003. This Royal Decree of 1993 establishes an institutional arbitration system characterised, in its procedure, by bringing together consecutive phases of mediation and arbitration, thus combining autocompositive and heterocompositive processes24. Subsequently, the Fifth and Sixth Final Provisions of Law 44/2006 imposed a new mandate on the Government to, on the one hand, recast Law 26/1984 and the rules transposing the Community Directives on consumer and user protection into a single legal text, and, on the other, to issue a new regulation for the Consumer Arbitration System to replace the one contained in the Royal Decree of 1993. As a result, both Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007 (Articles 57 and 58 of which include the Consumer Arbitration System) and Royal Decree 231/200825 (modified by Royal Decree 863/2009) arose. This last text regulates the so-called consumer arbitration system, which, in line with Royal Decree 636/1993, configures mediation as a first phase of the process (Articles 37 and 38), although endowed with sufficient conceptual independence and capable of allowing the parties to reach an agreement that puts an end to the conflict, unless it’s expressly opposed by either of them or when it is established that the mediation has been attempted without effect. Articles 57.1 TRLGDCU and 1.2 of the Royal Decree of 2008 contain a definition of the Consumer Arbitration System as a specialized, executive and binding institutional arbitration of extrajudicial resolution of conflicts arising between a consumer or user and a businessman or professional who, at his request, deals with the rights he’s legally or contractually entitled to. 24 BLANCO CARRASCO, M., “La alternativa de la mediación en conflictos de consumo: presente y futuro”, en Anuario jurídico y económico escurialense, No. 42, 2009, pp. 129 & ff. 25 Royal Legislative Decree 1/2007, of 16 November, approving the revised text of the General Law for the Defence of Consumers and Users and other complementary laws -TRLGDCU- (B.O.E. No. 287, of 30 November 2007) and Royal Decree 231/2008, of 15 February, regulating the Consumer Arbitration System (B.O.E. No. 48, of 25 February 2008), respectively. The former replaced the already repealed Law 26/1984, while the latter did the same with Royal Decree 636/1993. On the Royal Decree of 2008, see MARCOS FRANCISCO, D., “El arbitraje de consumo on line en el Real Decreto 231/2008, de 15 de febrero, regulador del sistema arbitral de consumo”, en Revista de la contratación electrónica, No. 96, 2008, pp. 3 & ff.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTE4NzM5Nw==