Product Liability Directive (PLD)

(46) It is necessary to alleviate the claimant’s burden of proof provided that certain conditions are fulfilled. Rebuttable presumptions of fact are a common mechanism for alleviating a claimant’s evidential difficulties and allowing a court to base the existence of defectiveness or of a causal link on the presence of another fact that has been proven while preserving the rights of the defendant. In order to provide an incentive to comply with the obligation to disclose information, national courts should presume the defectiveness of a product where a defendant fails to comply with such an obligation. Many mandatory safety requirements have been adopted in order to protect consumers and other natural persons from the risk of harm, including under General Product Safety Regulation. In order to reinforce the close relationship between product safety rules and liability rules, non-compliance with such requirements should also result in a presumption of defectiveness. That includes cases in which a product is not equipped with the means to log information about the operation of the product as required under Union or national law. The same should apply in the case of obvious malfunction, such as a glass bottle that explodes in the course of reasonably foreseeable use, since it is unnecessarily burdensome to require a claimant to prove defectiveness when the circumstances are such that its existence is undisputed. Reasonably foreseeable use covers the use for which a product is intended in accordance with the information provided by the manufacturer or economic operator placing it on the market, the ordinary use as determined by the design and construction of the product, and use which can be reasonably foreseen where such use could result from lawful and readily predictable human behaviour.