The President of the Czech Republic signs the new Criminal Code which introduces criminal sanctions for horizontal agreements

Introduction On 27 January 2009, the President of the Czech Republic signed the new Criminal Code adopted by the Chamber of Deputies and approved by the Senate. The codex will enter into force on 1 January 2010 whereby it will replace the current Criminal Code, dating back to 1961. In short, the purpose of the new Code is to finally detach the Czech criminal law from the last remnants of the Communist legal ideology and, above all, to bring this segment of law into line with modern European trends. To this end, the new Code brings about a great deal of changes among which features inter alia the criminalisation of certain anticompetitive prac-tices. The new criminal framework The criminalisation of anticompetitive practices is enshrined in Section 248 of the new Criminal Code. In