1. Understanding product liability

Any producer who places a product on the market has a legal obligation to ensure the general safety of the product, which requires :

• to market only safe products;

• to provide the consumer with information enabling him to assess the risks inherent in a product during its normal, or reasonably foreseeable, period of use, when these are not immediately perceptible without adequate warning, and to guard against them;

• monitor products, and, in the event of proven or strongly suspected malfunctions, intervene after they have been marketed and alert the relevant authorities to the identified risk.

A safe product is a product which, under :

• normal or reasonably foreseeable use (for example, using...