«Soft-law» in providing of fair competition
Keywords:
soft law, EU competition law, antitrust, guideline, notice, communication, national court, national judiciary, case law, recognitionAbstract
The goal of the current article is to delineate national judicial responses to Commission-issued competition soft law within two EU jurisdictions – the UK and the Netherlands. A comparative methodology is adopted and, in terms of theory, several hypotheses of possible judicial attitudes to soft law are established. In broad terms, it is ventured that courts can either recognize (agreement, disagreement, persuasion) or refuse to recognize (neglect, rejection) supranational soft law in their judicial discourse. While acknowledging that judicial refusal for recognition is a natural judicial response to legally non-binding instruments, the paper argues that competition soft law could and should become recognized by national courts of law because that would contribute positively to the enforcement system’s goals of consistency and the concomitant legal certainty and uniform application. The empirical picture that transpires, however, reveals a varied recognition
landscape that could well pose challenges for consistent enforcement. The EU competition enforcement regime underwent quite some changes in both its substantive and procedural workings when Regulation 1/2003 – the ‘Modernization’ Regulation – entered into force on May 1st 2004. The procedural decentralization and the change in the logic of substantive enforcement the Regulation introduced created challenges for the new system, especially in light of the general principle of legal certainty. Mindful of possible (and plausible) enforcement inconsistencies, the European Commission maintained that certainty is going to be well served by the already existing and welldeveloped competition case law of the CJEU, the Commission’s own decisional practice, and, last but not least, its soft law guidance in the forms of guidelines, notices, communications, etc. It is these latter instruments and their value for steering judicial discourse in EU Member States that the current paper is interested in.
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