The ‘Modernisation’ of European Community Competition Law: Achieving Consistency in Enforcement – Part I

Abstract

EC Council Regulation 1/2003 established a fundamentally new system for enforcing competition law in Europe. Under the Regulation, the European Commission relinquished its role as primary enforcement mechanism for the competition law provisions of arts. 81-82 EC. The Regulation placed Member State institutions – administrative agencies and courts – at the center of the enforcement process together with the Commission, and it promoted a wider and more active participation of antitrust institutions and civil courts of Member States (the so-called “decentralisation”). Critical to the success of this project is the capacity of the new system to achieve an acceptable degree of consistency in the application of Community competition law throughout the European Union. This is part one of a two-part article that analyzes the mechanisms that the new system employs for promoting and maintaining enforcement consistency in the interpretation and application of Community competition law and makes some preliminary evaluations on their functioning.

Keywords: antitrust law, competition law, European Union, civil courts