Rozsądny termin postępowania w sprawach o naruszenia reguł kon-kurencji – rozważania na tle wyroku z dnia 15 lipca 2015 r.
Reasonable time requirement in cases concerning breaches of competition rules: Reflections on the judgment of 15 July 2015

Summary/Abstract: Fundamental guarantees of the right to good administration include the right to fair handling of every person’s affairs within a reasonable time by the institutions and bodies of the European Union. The reasonable time for concluding administrative proceedings is a constitutive premise of said right and as such should be perceived in harmony with the remaining elements of the definition of the key term “right to good administration.” The correlations pointed out in this article determine that the reasonable time frames for administrative proceedings should be assessed by taking into account the right of the party to a defense at every stage of the proceedings. The model for implementing competition rules laid down in EU treaties is based predominantly on the concept of procedural authority expressed though such legal structures as actions ex officio by a competent body, the use of measures that compel the parties to handover relevant information and documents to the competent body, and the powers to take executive decisions and measures that both have a repressive effect and shape the market behavior of enterprises. Normative structures that serve the prevention of anti-competitive practices on the internal market must be consistently coupled with the entrepreneur’s right to a defense in proceedings before competition authorities. The lack of separation between investigative and decision-making functions may lead to arbitrary decisions and failure to fully respect the requirements of fair antitrust proceedings.

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