New paper: Territorial Extension and Case Law of the Court of Justice: Good Administration and Access to Justice in Procurement as a Case Study

I have uploaded a new paper on SSRN on 'Territorial Extension and Case Law of the Court of Justice: Good Administration and Access to Justice in Procurement as a Case Study', which develops previously sketched ideas on the challenges that the 'regulatory export' of EU procurement rules can create for the functioning of the CJEU and the Commission in the context of the EU's external trade activity (see here). The abstract of the paper is as follows:

This paper explores some of the legal implications of the territorial extension or extraterritoriality of EU public procurement law through free trade agreements and planned flanking retaliatory EU trade policy. The paper has the starting position that, with this policy and regulatory approach, the EU pursues two main goals: first, to further global standards of human rights protection and, second, to further regulatory convergence towards its own procurement standards. The paper concentrates on the pursuit of this second goal and, in particular, on the implications of such territorial extension or extraterritoriality of EU procurement law for the case law of the Court of Justice on good administration and access to justice, as recognised in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The paper concentrates on public procurement due to its relevance in free trade agreements between the EU and third countries, as well as the relevance of statutory and case law requirements concerning procurement remedies. The paper assesses both the outwards and inwards implications of the functional territorial extension for the case law of the Court of Justice. The discussion in the paper also raises general issues concerning procedural design and the consideration of foreign law by the Court of Justice in different settings.

The paper is freely available through SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3081061

New Paper on Extraterritoriality of EU Procurement Rules

I am presenting a paper on the extraterritoriality of EU public procurement rules at the research workshop "Extraterritoriality of EU Law & Human Rights after Lisbon: Scope and Boundaries", held at the Sussex European Institute on 13 & 14 July 2017.

The paper is entitled "An Ever-Changing Scope? The Expansive Boundaries of EU Public Procurement Rules, Extraterritoriality and the Court of Justice", and is available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3000256.

As the abstract indicates:

This paper looks at how the EU public procurement rules have shown a tendency to permanently expand their scope of application, both within and outside the EU. Inside the EU, the expansion has primarily resulted from blurred coverage boundaries and a creeping application outside their explicit scope. Outside the EU, the extraterritoriality has concerned scenarios such as the applicability of EU financial rules to procurement carried out as part of the EU’s external action in other areas (such as common foreign and security policy), or the regulatory transfer (or ‘export’) of EU procurement rules as part of trade deals—notably, the EU-Canada CETA, but also the EU-Ukraine DCFTA.

Concentrating solely on the ‘external’ dimension of the expansive scope of EU public procurement rules, in trying to explore some of the impacts of the extraterritorial effects of EU public procurement law on the legal and regulatory systems of third countries, this paper focuses on the implications that this expansion and extraterritoriality can have in terms of jurisdiction of the Court of Justice, as well as in terms of difficulties for the coordination of remedies systems in the area of public procurement. The paper concludes that the extraterritorial expansiveness of the EU’s public procurement rules is creating areas of potential legal uncertainty that deserve further analysis. Given the highly speculative nature of those scenarios at this stage, however, the paper does not attempt to provide any specific answers or tentative solutions to the issues it raises.

I intend to review the paper after the workshop and will appreciate any additional feedback that helps me improve it so, if you have the time and inclination to read the paper, please email me any comments to a.sanchez-graells@bristol.ac.uk, or feel free to post them in the comments section. Thank you in advance for any input.