Luis Ortiz-Blanco (ed), Eu Competition Procedure
| Published date | 01 January 2016 |
| DOI | 10.3366/elr.2016.0335 |
| Date | 01 January 2016 |
| Pages | 114-118 |
| Author |
The procedural rules governing the application of EU competition law have been hotly debated for a long time. They have raised a number of very important questions that transcend the “practicalities” of appearing before, for instance, the EU Commission as opposed to one of its national partners, namely the National Competition Authorities (hereinafter referred to as NCAs) or indeed from having to defend a claim of unlawful state aids before the competent national courts. They affect important general principles, such as those concerning fundamental rights protection and access to justice. The newest edition of Ortiz Blanco's edited volume on EU competition procedure is therefore welcome. This well-established piece is now truly impressive in its coverage, including general considerations concerning the machinery for the application of EU Competition law along with far more specific but no less important aspects thereof, such as the role and functioning of competition law in the context of the European Economic Area Agreement and the function of arbitration in this area of the law.
The book is divided into six parts and spans twenty nine chapters. In its first part, the application on the part of public authorities as well as of the national courts of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU is analysed in its key procedural aspects. Chapter 1 opens with an overview of competition law and its function in the wider framework of the EU Treaties, by setting out the mechanisms for enforcement against the background of the Union's “primary law.” It also teases out the implications for this machinery that will stem from key future changes on fundamental rights protection in particular.
Chapter 2 discusses the most important situations in which the national courts apply the Union's competition laws linking the rules governing jurisdiction in individual cases—found in the ‘Brussels Regulation’, i.e. Council Regulation No 44/2001—with those affecting the actual procedural requirements that individual claims must satisfy in each jurisdiction. Chapter 3 deals with the role of the NCAs, providing an agile and informative discussion of the rules governing their jurisdiction, their obligations of cooperation within the European Competition Network (ECN) vis-à-vis the EU Commission and one another, and the possible impact of these obligations on the effective enforcement of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU, with a particular eye towards leniency programmes.
Chapter 4 outlines the structure of proceedings before the EU Commission against the wider background of the principles that underscore the current Implementing Regulation (Council Regulation No 1/2003), namely the principle of self-assessment, along with questions of evidence and reliability thereof and the burden and standard of proof that the Commission must meet for the adoption of an infringement decision. Chapter 5 contains a very detailed analysis of the factual and evidence-related preconditions that the Commission needs to satisfy to justify taking up a new case. The chapter concentrates on the role of complainants and on the very notion and discipline of...
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