The ECJ today made life more difficult for insurers covering risks arising under the Product Liability Directive. This Directive, you will remember, says that the victim of a defective product need not prove negligence, but must prove defectiveness and causation. W v Sanofi Pasteur [2017] EUECJ C-621/15 was a vaccine damage case. A couple of years after beginning a course of anti-hepatitis vaccination, W had multiple sclerosis. There being no clear medical evidence as to how the disease came about, a French court was prepared to infer from the proximity between vaccination and disease and the lack of any other explanation that the vaccine had been defective and had caused the injury. It therefore gave judgment for W, a view held justified by the Cour de Cassation. After a few further procedural skirmishes, Sanofi — or, one suspects, its insurers — went to the ECJ, alleging that inferences of this sort were contrary to the explicit requirement in Art.4 that the claimant actually prove these matters, and that strict proof in every particular ought to be required.
The ECJ, as expected, was having none of it. The Directive existed to make life easier for injured consumers; furthermore, the real complaint related not so much to the burden of proof as to the means of proof, which was a matter of procedure left up to national courts.
Stand by underwriters, as we said, for increased payouts under our home-grown version of the Directive, Part I of the Consumer Protection Act 1987.
