Obligation of the European Commission to review national civil court judgements?

Abstract

National (civil) courts play a significant role in enforcing EU competition law as functional Union courts. This scientific article objective is to investigate the extent to which the European Commission is obligated to follow the decisions of national civil courts. The analysis requires an examination of the appropriate legal framework. As a result, in the first part of the paper, the European Commission obligation to take into account the decisions of the national courts from primary law perspective will be examined. Based on this, the second part explore the link between the European Commission and national courts from the standpoint of relevant secondary law. From the scientific methods we have used the analytical and descriptive method to analyse the current situation. By comparative method we introduce different views on the legal regulation. The presented topic has not been thoroughly examined in the literature on the subject thus far, giving the chance to identify avenues for future research.