A court in Paris, France, on Friday, local time, rejected the French government's emergency application to suspend the operations of Chinese fast fashion platform Shein in France after regulators found illegal weapons and "child-looking sex dolls" and other products for sale on the platform.
After the court ruling was made, Xiyin welcomed the result and said it would continue to cooperate with the French authorities to strengthen the platform's product review and control process, and reiterated that its "first priority is still to protect French consumers and ensure compliance with local laws and regulations."
The incident can be traced back to early November this year, when the French consumer protection agency and the Ministry of Finance initiated procedures to suspend Xiyin's online market operations in France in accordance with relevant laws and regulations. The reason was that regulators found sex dolls with children's images on the platform and banned weapons products classified as "Class A weapons" by France. At the same time, Xiyin opened its first permanent store in Paris, which aroused great public attention.
According to the French side, the regulatory authorities issued a time-limited order to Xiyin, requiring it to remove relevant problematic products from the shelves within a few hours. Xiyin subsequently announced a ban on the sale of the above-mentioned products on the French platform, and significantly tightened or even basically closed the entrance to the third-party seller market for French users to reduce potential risks to the compliance of platform products.
In addition to domestic regulatory actions, French officials have also submitted a request to the European Commission to review why these illegal products can be sold on the platform in accordance with the relevant EU rules for large online intermediary platforms, and to assess whether there are loopholes in the existing regulatory framework. French authorities did not immediately respond to media requests for comment.