Since their creation, the European Union and the Council of Europe have worked to harmonise the justice systems of their member states. This project has been met with a series of challenges. European Criminal Law offers a compelling insight into the development and functions of European criminal law. It tracks the historical development of European criminal law, offering a detailed critical analysis of the criminal justice systems responsible for its implementation. While the rapid expansion and transnationalisation of criminal law is a necessary response to the growing numbers of free movement of persons and goods, it has serious implications for the rights of European citizens and needs to be balanced with rights protections. With its close analysis of secondary legislation and reliance on a wide variety of original sources, this book provides a thorough understanding of European Criminal Law and the institutions involved.

European Criminal Law

This paper distills and organizes facts about cartels from about 20 European Commission decisions over 2000-2004. It describes the properties of a collusive outcome in terms of the setting of price and a market allocation, monitoring of agreements with respect to price but more importantly sales, punishment methods for enforcing an agreement and also the use of buy-backs to compensate cartel members, methods for responding to external disruptions from non-cartel suppliers and handling over-zealous sales representatives, and operational procedures in terms of the frequency of meetings and the cartel’s organizational structure.

/pdf/how-do-cartels-operate-11xkgdbngf.pdf

How Do Cartels Operate

http://idei.fr/sites/default/files/medias/doc/by/rey/leniency.pdf

The impact of leniency and whistle-blowing programs on cartels

The article presents a unique regression analysis of social-science estimates of the size of cartel overcharges. More than 800 overcharge rates were collected from a variety of published sources that have appeared in the literature during the last 125 years. A meta-analysis of overcharges from 395 cartel episodes finds that duration, legal environment, and organizational characteristics of cartels explain the variation on overcharge rates to a greater extent than the type of publication or the method of overcharge analysis. In particular, overcharges are significantly higher for durable international cartels and are declining as antitrust enforcement regimes have stiffened. Historical case studies and government reports calculate lower overcharges, whereas antitrust authorities arrive at relatively high rates.

Cartel Overcharges: Survey and Meta-Analysis

Deterrence will often fail because it falls into the 'deterrence trap' - penalties are either not large enough or so large they exceed the capacity to pay. Responsive regulation, by contrast, builds commitment to compliance through moral suasion backed up by tough enforcement action. Empirical evidence on the impact of the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's cartel enforcement activity shows that in overcoming the deterrence trap, responsive regulators can fall into 'compliance trap.' The 'compliance trap' occurs where there is a lack of political and cultural support for the moral seriousness of the law it must enforce, such as is the case with much of the law relating to business regulation. The regulator can choose to nevertheless take enforcement action in a way that garners compliance by communicating the moral seriousness of breaches of the law. If they do so, however, their enforcement action will ultimately lack legitimacy in the eyes of business regulatees. Most regulators most of the time will end up taking the easy option of enforcing the law 'softly' or formalistically, and therefore ineffectively.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID930233_code353054.pdf?abstractid=927559&mirid=1&type=2

The Compliance Trap: The Moral Message in Responsive Regulatory Enforcement

INTRODUCTION: TALKING ABOUT CARTELS: THE MAIN ELEMENTS OF ANALYSIS AND DISCUSSION I. Business Cartels0: Sleeping with the Enemy III. Cartels in Europe 1870-1945: Das Kartellproblem IV. Cartels in Europe 1945-70: From Registrable Agreement to Concerted Practice V. A Narrative of Cartel Enforcement in Europe, 1970 to the Present Time VI. Proof of Cartel Delinquency: Fashioning the European Cartel Off VII. Judicial of Cartel Control: Testing the Evidence and Due Process VIII. Negotiating Guilt: Leniency and Breaking the Code of Silence IX. Sanctions : Dealing with Business Delinquency X. Cartel Law in the Twenty-First Century: Globalized and Criminal

/pdf/regulating-cartels-in-europe-a-study-of-legal-control-of-ypxa75qlc1.pdf

Regulating Cartels in Europe: A Study of Legal Control of Corporate Delinquency

Harding, Christopher; Gibbs, Alun, (2005) 'Why Go to Court in Europe? An Analysis of Cartel Appeals, 1995-2004', European Law Review 3, pp. 349-370. RAE2008

Why go to court in Europe? An analysis of cartel appeals 1995-2004

Introduction and Overview: Talking About Cartels - The Main Elements of Analysis and Discussion 1. Business Cartels: Sleeping With The Enemy 2. Models of Legal Control: North America and Europe 3. Cartels In Europe, 1870-1945: Das Kartellproblem 4. Cartels in Europe, 1945-1970: From Registrable Agreement to Concerted Practice 5. A Narrative of Cartel Enforcement in Europe, 1970 to the Present Time 6. Proof of Cartel Delinquency: Fashioning the European Cartel Offence 7. The Judicial Review of Cartel Control: Testing the Evidence and Due Process 8. Negotiating Guilt: Leniency and Breaking the Code of Silence 9. The Pathology of Cartels: Addressing Issues of Agency and Responsibility 10. Sanctions: A Complex European and International Grid 11. Corporate and Individual Sanctions 12. The Shape of Things to Come: Cartel Law in the Twenty-first Century Bibliography

Regulating cartels in Europe

Harding, Christopher, Baker, Estella, (2009) 'From past imperfect to future perfect? A longitudinal study of the Third Pillar', European Law Review 34 (1), pp. 25-54. Keywords: Competence; Criminal law; EC law; European Community; Justice and home affairs

From past imperfect to future perfect? A longitudinal study of the Third Pillar

According to several contemporary observers, the British prison system at the end of the nineteenth century was in a savage and deplorable state. A series of articles in The Daily Chronicle in January 1894 referred to these prisons as ‘our dark places’. They were managed by a man a few years later accredited with a ‘barbaric philosophy’. The severity of this prison system was said to be legendary even in Russia. This school of observation then developed the view that the penal system was rescued by the recommendations of an influential home office report published in 1895. Named after its chairman, the then under secretary at the home office, Herbert Gladstone, this report was welcomed as ‘the beginning of a beneficient revolution’. Upon its publication, the man vilified in The Daily Chronicle, the chairman of the prison commissioners, Sir Edmund Du Cane, resigned his post; the newspaper greeted this event as ‘the inevitable end of a discredited system’. How correct was this perception of the late nineteenth-century British prison system?

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0018246X00023505

Christopher Harding

Papers

Regulating Cartels in Europe: A Study of Legal Control of Corporate Delinquency

Why go to court in Europe? An analysis of cartel appeals 1995-2004

Regulating cartels in Europe

From past imperfect to future perfect? A longitudinal study of the Third Pillar

‘The inevitable end of a discredited system’? The Origins of the Gladstone Committee Report on Prisons, 1895