Consumer Credit

National courts which had found that terms of a contract had been unfair, had been required under Art 6(1) of Council Directive (EEC) 93/13, first, to draw all the consequences that followed under national law, so that the consumer had not been bound by those terms, and second, to assess whether the contract in question could have continued to exist without those unfair terms. The objective pursued by the EU legislation in connection with Directive 93/13 consisted in restoring the balance between the parties while in principle preserving the validity of the contract as a whole, not in abolishing all contracts containing unfair terms.

As regarded the criteria for assessing whether a contract could have continued to exist without the unfair terms, Art 6(1) of Directive 93/13 and the requirements concerning the legal certainty of economic activities, pleaded in favour of an objective approach in interpreting that provision. It followed that the situation of one of the parties to the contract, in