JUDICIAL COLLECTIVE ENFORCEMENT OF FUNDAMENTAL RIGHTS IN A MULTILEVEL EUROPEAN CONSTITUTIONAL PERSPECTIVE. A FOCUS ON THE ITALIAN CLASS ACTION REGIME

The current societal transformations, brought by globalisation and technological innovation, have disrupted the multilevel constitutional landscape, now fragmented in standardised and massified relationships where inequalities are increasingly amplified. Against such backdrop, the democratic mechanisms of representation, on the one hand, and the traditional civil law dualistic paths of litigation, on the other hand, appear ineffective in enforcing rights, especially fundamental ones. The present research, theoretical and empirical, aims to evaluate the role of class actions as a means of overcoming such challenges and ensuring concrete access to justice. Adopting an innovative constitutional-law standpoint, it focuses on the Italian jurisdiction, as part of the broader European multilevel system, and in particular the Italian 2019 reform which introduced a dual (injunctive and compensatory) collective procedure of general application. For this purpose, the investigation analyses, also with a comparative lens, the constitutional foundations of collective enforcement (as opposed to individual one), the specific use of collective proceedings to enforce fundamental rights and the potential drawbacks in light of possible abuse and fair trial guarantees. The topicality of the study is also given by the recent EU Directive 2020/1828 on representative actions for the protection of the collective interests of consumers.