<i>Sped-Pro</i>: The Impact of Rule-of-Law Backsliding on the Enforcement of (EU) Competition Law

The Sped-Pro judgment concerns an action for annulment of an EU Commission decision rejecting a complaint alleging the abuse of a dominant position by the Polish state-owned railway company PKP Cargo. In this judgment, the General Court for the first time established a direct link between systematic deficiencies in the legal order of a Member State and the ability of its competition authority to investigate and take enforcement action under EU law. The General Court addressed issues of the rule of law as an element of effective competition law enforcement and the case allocation principles between the Commission and National Competition Authorities (NCAs) under the decentralised enforcement system of Regulation 1/2003. The General Court now requires the Commission to examine, when handling complaints, whether an NCA can actually enforce EU law effectively

Annulment Actions and the V4: Taking Legislative Conflicts Before the CJEU

The EU member states have been using the action for annulment to challenge the legality of EU measures while pursuing a range of non-legal and essentially political motivations. This also holds for the V4 member states, which have also resorted to annulment actions to judicialize their legislative conflicts within the EU before the CJEU. Among the V4, Poland has been the most frequent litigant, using this institutional tool increasingly actively during the last 10 years. Poland’s behavior appears to confirm expectations of differentiation among this group of member states. It also coincides with a period of political change marked by deep legislative conflicts within the EU. The V4 annulment challenges against EU legislative measures usually made a genuine effort to achieve the legal objective of annulling the challenged legal act. However, there is evidence that they also pursued certain political motivations or a combination of them. These could include the securing of gains in domestic politics, avoiding the local costs of an EU policy misfit and/or promoting a preferred policy position, and/or influencing EU competence arrangements. In a few cases, the litigant member state aimed to avoid concrete material disadvantages. Securing a legal interpretation from the CJEU that would influence the behavior of other EU actors or clarify the law affecting the position of the applicant member state also motivated some of the V4 legal challenges