The Conference’s aim is to discuss whether regulation presently in force in European Union Member States concerning liability for loss caused by defective products, as implemented under Council Directive of 25 July 1985 (85/374/EEC) on the approximation of the laws, regulations and administrative provisions of the Member States concerning liability for defective products, remains, after thirty years, an adequate legal response to the phenomenon of products brought to market that fail to ensure appropriate levels of safety for their users.

Furthermore the Conference will be opportunity to discuss if European law will in the near future ensure sufficient safety for individuals using the goods produced by applying technologies currently under development.

The need of assessing the timeliness of present regulations at the Conference is the result of several factors. The Directive was issued three decades ago and implemented into the legal regimes of Member States either shortly after its issuance, or in the case of states acceding to the European Union later on – during the pre-accession phase. In the case of tort law, this is a sufficiently long period to undertake a review of the regulation. While reviews have been performed by EU institutions at five-year intervals since the directive's issuance, they were largely justifyed on examining the directive's functioning rather than verifying its assumptions and material solutions.

The Directive is an instrument of maximum harmonization, which means that Member States cannot adopt regulation that differs from the contents of the directive in areas covered by it. This has given rise to significant difficulties in practice with regard to adapting domestic rules on product liability to other principles of tort liability applied in particular domestic legal regimes. The impossibility of elastic implementation of the directive or of shaping it to the structure and content of domestic tort law may be one element of the noticeable disproportion between the practical significance of product liability in various states' legal practice. In some legal systems regulation on product liability is frequently applied, while in others it is practically non-existent as a basis for damages claims.

The crucial argument in favor of undertaking a thorough review of the current regulation's timeliness is the dynamic growth of new technologies, which is a phenomenon characteristic of the last decade and one supposed to be an engine of growth for the European Union in the coming years. Indeed, we are currently witnesses to the dynamic development of technology in various spheres of life.