Michele Messina

The Protection of the Right to Private Life, Home and Correspondence v the Efficient Enforcement of Competition Law: Is a New EC Competition Court the Right Way Forward?

The debate concerning the possible creation of a new EC specialised court on competition law matters has been fuelled recently by an inquiry launched by the House of Lords Select Committee on the European Union, now ended with the publication of its Report on 23 April 2007. Although this inquiry, following a proposal from the Confederation of British Industry (CBI), deals more specifically with the delays of the present EC judicial system as regards the review of merger cases, the scope of the present paper is to analyse one possible alternative reason for the desirability, if at all, of an EU Judicial Panel on Competition Law matters,1 concerning in particular a higher degree of compliance with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), while guaranteeing an as efficient EC competition law enforcement system. Particular attention will be focused on whether the power of inspection, ex Article 20(4) of Regulation 1/2003, is compatible with Article 8 ECHR, whose aim is to protect private and family life, home and correspondence against state interference and, most importantly, if that power to interfere can be justified upon meeting the criteria set out in Article 8(2) ECHR, as further refined by the ECtHR jurisprudence. The broad power of investigation of the Commission may not allegedly meet the third criterion, according to which the interference has to be “necessary in a democratic June 2007 European Competition Journal 185