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 present paper is divided into three broad sections. The first one deals with an analysis of the protection of fundamental rights with regard to inspections by decision, in particular the compatibility of the Commission’s inspection powers with Article 8(2) ECHR regarding the circumstances wherein a public authority can interfere with the right to private life guaranteed by paragraph 1.

The second section analyses whether the current ex ante and ex post judicial controls on the Commission’s decisions under Article 20(4) of Regulation 1/2003 are effective, thus introducing the third section.

The scope of this third section is twofold: first, it discusses the desirability of a centralised system of ex ante judicial control in order to comply in a more satisfactory way with the provision and, most importantly, with the jurisprudence of the ECHR; and secondly, it assesses if that system may be better implemented by an EC specialised competition court or by the present CFI, possibly with some organisa tional changes, concluding in favour of the latter solution as the more feasible for the time being."