Remedy as of Right for Consumer Protection

Abstract

The scope and meaning of remedies are very wide and almost every legal question could be posed in terms of remedies. Remedy is used to redress or prevent a right which is legally recognised hence remedy is the means by which a right is enforced or by which the violation of a right is prevented or compensated. In the law of contract, remedies are often linked with rights, whereby in breach of contract, damages are available as a matter of right. Rights and remedies are intertwined, the right derives from the remedy and as a matter of sequence the remedy precedes the right. Consequently, the absence of a remedy points to the non-existence of a legal right. In Malaysia, the advocacy of the consumer rights effected the government to enact Consumer Protection Act 1999 (CPA1999) which aims to provide a comprehensive scheme of protection for consumers. However, the CPA 1999 failed to recognise that in order to establish the rights of consumer, its remedies shall be sufficiently redress the consumers in time of breach. Regrettably, the CPA 1999 does not provide sufficient statutory remedies for consumers. Besides the CPA 1999, the Acts that govern the consumer sales of goods contracts include the Contract Act 1950 (CA 1950) and the Sales of Goods Act 1957 (SOGA 1957) which caused many problems in the remedies of consumer sales of goods contracts. This article critically analysed the problems underlying the statutory provisions in Malaysia that governing the contractual remedies of consumer sales of goods contracts. By adopting pure legal research methodology, this article analysed the relationship between right and remedies in the scope of consumer protection. The statutory provisions governing consumer sales of goods remedies will be critically evaluated in order to highlight the insufficiency of the contractual remedies for sales of goods contracts in Malaysia.

DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2016.v7n2p142