EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

3.2 Methodology As the CJEU states

[I]n order to determine whether national rules on limitation strike such a balance, all elements of those rules must be taken into consideration (…), which may include, inter alia, the date from which the limitation period begins to run, the duration of that period and the rules for suspending or interrupting it. In order to conclude that a national statute of limitations does not strike the necessary balance, it is thus not sufficient to conclude that the specificities of competition law are not respected by only one of the elements of the respective statute of limitations. In this case, in order to assess the possible above-mentioned conflict of Czech law with EU law, it is thus necessary to evaluate the statute of limitations system in Czech competition law as a whole with all its aspects, not just its specific parts in isolation. The authors determined that in the context of enforcing EU competition law the best example of a statute of limitations that strikes the perfect balance between provision of, on the one hand, sufficient legal certainty and ensuring that cases are dealt with within a reasonable time and, on the other hand, the effective and efficient application of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU would be the EU law itself as Regulation 1/2003 comprehensively sets out the statute of limitations with regard to EU competition law and its individual aspects. This is because it would be completely illogical and disproportionate if a Member State could be accused of having an unbalanced statute of limitations in the above-mentioned sense if the statute of limitations was identical to the one inherent to EU law. It is thus only logical, that the benchmark for achieving sufficient balance should be EU law itself and the balance of national statute of limitations shall thus be compared to the balance which is inherent to the statute of limitations provided for in Regulation 1/2003. Whether the national statute of limitations strikes the necessary balance according to the aforementioned CJEU case law should thus determined on the basis of a comparison of the national statute of limitations as a whole with all its individual aspects to the statute of limitations which is provided for in Regulation 1/2003. But as this would be almost impossible to do with the concept of the statute of limitations as a whole, for the sake of practicality, the author determined that comparison should be made first on the level of the individual aspect of each of those statutes of limitations. Only after comparing the individual aspect can both statutes of limitations be compared comprehensively as a whole. In this context, it can be concluded that the deficiencies of one integral aspect of the statute of limitations may be compensated by the nature and specification of

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