Legal Certainty and Cartel Criminalisation within the EU Member States

Each month we collect up and record all the outputs made by CCP members. To give people an idea of the scope of the research we undertake we are going to be publishing the abstracts and links to papers written by our colleagues in the Centre.

Peter Whelan has published Legal Certainty and Cartel Criminalisation within the EU Member States in The Cambridge Law Journal.

Legal Certainty and Cartel Criminalisation within the EU Member States

Abstract

There is a trend within the EU Member States to introduce criminal sanctions for cartel activity. Such criminalisation must respect the human rights of the accused. Unfortunately the literature on cartel criminalisation pays scant regard to the investigation of human rights issues. A comprehensive analysis of the impact of the principle of legal certainty (Article 7 ECHR) upon cartel criminalisation in the EU Member States is conspicuously absent from the literature. This article rectifies this deficiency by examining how this particular principle of European human rights law may impact upon the concept, substance and existence of a criminal cartel offence.