Vartotojų teisių apsaugos administravimas elektroninėje erdvėje

Abstract

This Master thesis is about the electronic administration of the consumer rights protection. The purpose of this paper is to determine how the consumer rights protection is administrated in Lithuania and in the countries of the European Union (EU); as well as to propose the ways in which the administration system in Lithuania could be improved and a modern and progressive electronic administration system could be created. The point of this scheme is to transfer from the traditional “paper-based” administration to the “online-based” electronic administration. E-administration is a new term and it means the administration activity based on computer technologies. The paper finds out that the advantages of the online administration are these as follows: time saving, improving quality of the service, smaller expenditures, less overloaded traffic of emails. In regard to the legal basis to ensure the proper functioning of the e-administration in Lithuania, the paper concludes that foremost attention should be given on realisation of the law norms, on passing the necessary by-laws, on conducting public awareness and education campaigns, on increasing efficiency of supervisory institutions. Paper explains the consumers protecting networks in the European Union, which are merely based on information and Internet technologies (ICPEN, econsumer.gov, RAPEX, EEJ-Net ir FIN-Net). These electronic networks administrate different consumer complains on international level and help the individual consumers to find best solutions in their trans-border cases. The research project “Electronic Processing of Consumer Complains in the EU Institutions” determined that only 38 percent of the institutions of EU countries administrate their incoming consumer complains in the electronic way. The paper points out that the online public services in Lithuania are available only on the initial first and second levels. That means that e-government is in its early stage of development. Therefore there is a huge potential for an expansion in the area of e-government in Lithuania. It is concluded that the final goal of e-administration development should be the achievement of the fourth level of all electronic public services.