EU Competition Law: Procedure and Process before the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union

Eileen Sheehan, LL.M. (Bruges)

The purpose of this lecture is to examine the impact that the procedure in accordance with which a given competition case is presented before the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union can influence the legal outcome or solution in that case.

It will be submitted that an awareness of such procedural “constraints” is necessary in order to fully understand the scope of the judgment.

To illustrate this point, the nature of judicial review in competition cases brought before the General Court pursuant to Article 263 TFEU, the scope of appeals from the General Court to the Court of Justice and the preliminary reference procedure pursuant to Article 267 TFEU, together with the principle of national procedural autonomy, will be examined.

Particular attention will therefore be paid in the lecture to the relevant articles of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) on the Court of Justice of the European Union, the rules of procedure of the General Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union and Regulation 1/2003.