On 4 June 2026, the Tribunal judiciaire de Caen confirmed that the Auchan off-ramp was not available to everyone, and a self-declared accessibility percentage under 100% was not enough.
When the Auchan ruling landed in May, we argued two things here:
- That the threshold off-ramp Auchan was granted only works for an Auchan-sized entity, and that the larger retailers in the same set of cases would be tested on the merits instead.
- That a self-declared conformance percentage is a claim, not a defense.
In the emergency injunction proceedings (assignation en référé) brought by the same associations that brought the Auchan case, the Caen court ordered Carrefour France to make carrefour.fr and the Carrefour mobile app accessible within six months, with a penalty of €500 per day for every day it runs late after that. It’s the first EAA court decision in the EU to order a company to comply, after the Auchan case was dismissed in May, and it points in the opposite direction.
What the court ordered
The facts are narrow and worth stating plainly.
Carrefour did not contest that it was subject to the obligation. Unlike Auchan, there was no argument about which threshold applied or whether the company was big enough to be in scope. Carrefour France is, by any reading, well over the line. So the case was decided on whether its site and app were accessible, not on whether the law reached it.
Carrefour’s defense was its own conformance rate. The company pointed to a figure of roughly 71% against the RGAA, France’s accessibility standard, and argued that this was enough. The court rejected that outright. It treated digital accessibility as an obligation of result (obligation de résultat): a site cannot be only “partly accessible,” it has to be accessible. Where a company chooses to measure itself against the RGAA, 100% of the applicable criteria have to be met.
The claimant associations put it more vividly in their statement on the ruling: You need to cover 100% of a staircase’s steps with a ramp, not most of them. That framing is theirs rather than the court’s, but it captures what the order means in practice. In the court’s reasoning, there is no passing grade below 100% of the applicable criteria.
Why “71%” was never going to hold
Last month, we explained where these retailer conformance rates come from and why they’re slipperier than they look: self-declared, produced by a firm the company hires, and published as two figures with the friendlier one out front. The short version is that under the RGAA, anything below 100% is non-compliant, so 71% was never a pass. The full explainer is in that post.
What is new is what Carrefour did with the number. It brought a respectable, improving score into court as grounds for not ordering it to comply. The Auchan piece could only make the “71% is a failing grade” point in the abstract. Carrefour is the point with a ruling attached: a company put its conformance rate forward as a defense, and the court answered that an obligation of result does not bend to a percentage.
Carrefour also argued that the site changes daily, which makes total, real-time accessibility genuinely hard to maintain. That is true, and it is not a defense. The obligation does not soften because the product is busy. If anything, it’s the argument for building accessibility into how the site ships rather than auditing it once a year and publishing the result. Carrefour says it has a plan to reach 100% by the end of 2026. The court’s six-month clock runs on a similar horizon, with a meter attached.
When the Auchan ruling landed we reduced it to a sentence: A conformance percentage on your accessibility statement is a claim, not a defense. Carrefour is that sentence with a court behind it.
Two courts, one article, two directions
Here is the genuinely unsettled part, and the reason this is more than “one win, one loss.”
Both rulings turned on the same provision: Article L412-13 of the French Consumer Code, which is where the EAA was transposed. The two courts read it differently.
As we set out for the Auchan ruling, the Lille court leaned on the literal opening of that article, which begins “without prejudice to Articles 47 and 48 of the 2005 law.” It read that phrase as preserving France’s older domestic regime, with its €250 million revenue threshold, and let the 2005 law effectively supplant the newer Consumer Code provision. On that reading, the Auchan subsidiary fell below €250 million and escaped.
The Caen court grounded its injunction against Carrefour directly in L412-13, the EAA transposition itself. That looks like the more autonomous reading, the one the associations have been arguing for.
But a note of caution before anyone calls this a precedent.
As the lawyer Simon Parier observes in his analysis of the two decisions, Carrefour exceeds the €250 million threshold anyway. It would have fallen under the 2005 law regardless of which provision the judge cited, so Caen is not a clean test of whether L412-13 can stand on its own at the €2 million level. The choice of motivation is suggestive, not settled. It could prefigure a more independent reading of L412-13, or it could be a detail the case never actually forced.
Which means the question that matters most for mid-market companies, the band sitting between €2 million and €250 million in revenue, is still open. That band is in scope under EU law and, on the Lille reading, out of scope under French law. The place it gets resolved is the Cour d’appel de Douai, where the associations have appealed the Auchan decision. Until Douai rules, France has two first-instance decisions reasoning through the same article and arriving in different places.
What’s still coming
The same associations are running two more cases.
E.Leclerc is scheduled to be heard on 22 September 2026 in Créteil. Picard Surgelés has no confirmed hearing date yet. Like Carrefour, both clear the €250 million line comfortably, which means the threshold off-ramp does nothing for them and their accessibility will be tested on the merits, exactly as Carrefour’s was.
Carrefour, for its part, says it’s examining the Caen decision and reserves the right to appeal. So this may not be over either.
What this changes for your compliance posture
It should not change your plan, only your read on which parts of it are load-bearing. The full checklist from the Auchan post still applies; Carrefour sharpens one item in particular.
The number on your accessibility statement has now been offered in court and rejected. If yours carries a percentage and has never been checked against the journeys a user with disabilities actually has to complete, it tells you what your vendor measured, not where you stand. And there is no tier of “accessible enough” underneath it. A site in the seventies is not most of the way to compliant; on the standard the court applied, it is at best non-compliant with a good attitude.
The Auchan ruling let a small enough defendant out on a technicality. Carrefour closed the more tempting exit, the one a lot more companies were quietly counting on: the belief that a decent and improving score buys room to be mostly accessible. Once you are clearly in scope, it does not. The only question still genuinely open is the one now sitting with the Cour d’appel de Douai, and it is about who the law reaches, not about whether your percentage will hold. That part already has an answer.
This article does not constitute legal advice.
