Judicial review and anticompetitive agreements: An overview of EU and national case law

I. Introduction This article provides an overview of current trends in European cartel law from mid-2016 to mid-2019. We begin with the following preliminary remarks. In order to guarantee that the European Commission (“Commission”) can adequately carry out its task to oversee and ensure the effective implementation of the EU competition rules, it has been granted a wide range of far-reaching, and even “coercive” competences. For many years, one of the main disputed points has been whether the Commission’s role as investigator, prosecutor and first-instance decision-maker is compatible with Article 6(1) of the European Convention on Human Rights (“ECHR”), which gives expression to the undertakings’ right to a fair trial “by an independent and impartial tribunal”. [1] However, the risks