On July 4, Alexey Ivanov, Director of the BRICS Competition Law and Policy Centre, moderated the session entitled "Judicial and Administrative Appeals of the Decisions and Acts of Regional Competition Authorities" at the 4th Meeting of Regional Organizations on Competition, hosted by the Eurasian Economic Commission as a side event at the sidelines of the 22nd session of the UNCTAD IGE.
The previous meetings of the regional organizations have built up a rich agenda of the most outstanding issues relevant for the work of regional competition authorities (such as national and regional legislation, authority powers and competence, the investigation procedure, consideration and prioritization of cases, advocacy, and interaction between regional and national authorities). To take this discussion to a more advanced stage, this meeting invited participants to focus on judicial and other available procedures applied to appealing of the decisions and acts of regional competition authorities.
As regional competition regimes are becoming more prominent and developed, it is necessary that appeal regimes are aligned between the national and the regional levels without causing overlaps in jurisdiction and setting other obstacles in the functioning of regional competition authorities. For complex cases with a regional scale, this is an even more outstanding issue as administrative and judicial decision-making in this context needs to be fast and keep pace with the market. By way of example, appeals of the European Commission’s decisions in the Google cases took long enough for Google’s dominance to extend even further compared to the pre-appeal levels. To avoid this, regional competition authorities should constantly work on the speed and efficiency of their procedures bearing in mind strategies businesses use to slow up the appeal procedure.
Speakers were invited to share their experiences on the following aspects:
- Types of appeal procedures applicable to the decisions and actions of regional competition authorities;
- The role of national competition authorities in the appeal procedure;
- Strategies used by businesses to obstruct the appeal procedures;
- Successful and less successful cases;
- Features and problems of the appeal procedure, etc;
- Pathways to develop and improve regional laws and mechanisms on procedure.