PRACTICES : COMPETITION LAW - INTERIM MEASURES - JUDGES OF THE EUROPEAN UNIONORDERS – FIELD - CONDITIONS - URGENCY

Interim measures ordered by EU Courts in EU competition law cases

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This article attempts to define the main features of orders handed down in the field of competition law by the judges of the European Union, using the period between 1999 and 2011 as a basis for its analysis. It shows that the scope of competition law orders is in practice limited. It also reveals that the trend towards an increasingly restrictive review of the conditions applicable to interim measures before the judges of the European Union can also be observed in this field. This article submits that, even though the case law still applies a case-by-case analysis, the judges hearing applications for interim relief, instead of focusing on the condition of urgency, should come back to the more flexible approach by which the various conditions for interim relief were considered as intertwined and analyzed as a whole.

*This article is an automatic translation of the original article, provided here for your convenience. Read the original article. 1. While "time is at the heart of all proceedings" [1], the question of its passage is particularly acute in competition proceedings, where the time lag between business and legal time is a constant source of tension. For the regulator, the aim is to act before the actions of companies produce irreversible effects on the market. On the other hand, companies often have to suspend or at least adjust their legal time. That is what they are able to do in the summary proceedings before the Court of Justice of the European Union, in which the applicants - most often undertakings - will ask the court for interim measures either to suspend legal time by ordering the

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