Home -> Law Blog Directory -> International Law Blogs -> EU Law Blog

International Law

: EU Law Blog

Commission Report on How Regulation 1/2003 Works

By Bartolus

Regulation 1/2003 is the main regulation laying down the procedure in antitrust cases. It entered into force on on May 1 2004. It brought about a major reform of the procedure by decentralizing the application of the EU antitrust rules and co-opted national competition authorities and national courts to apply those provisions.

The Commission had to report publicly within 5 years on how the new system worked.

You can read the report in full (COM(2009) 206 final) here and the Staff Working Paper (SEC(2009) 574 final) that contains more detail here.

Notwithstanding the stilted, self congratulatory tone, those documents are worth reading and contain a wealth of information that will delight antitrust mavens. It does seem that the system has worked pretty well and that national competition authorities have applied Articles 81 and 82 EC satisfactorily (sometimes more effectively than the Commission itself). Certainly, the rights of the companies investigated are more effectively protected on the domestic level than the EU one.

The report is inconclusive as to what changes should be made to Regulation 1/2003 to make the system better still.

Full post as published by EU Law Blog on May 02, 2009 (boomark / email).