This year December 5 marks World Competition Day, and Poland’s Office of Competition and Consumer Protection (UOKiK) will join organisers Consumer Unity & Trust Society (CUTS International) and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in celebrating the day. The Authority would take this opportunity to remind readers of its priorities on a range of consumer and competition protection issues.

Operating with transparency and guaranteeing procedural fairness are among the tasks of competition protection authorities, and UOKiK employs both. In addition, the Office this year introduced its detailed justification of charges procedure, the equivalent to the Statement of Objections used by the European Commission and other European competition authorities. The justifications are intended to improve the standards of procedural fairness, including the right to defense. That right was established by the European Court of Human Rights rulings as well as EU and national courts, which are placing greater emphasis on observance of the rights of the defense in administrative proceedings.

UOKiK will issue justifications in all proceedings initiated after 1 September 2015, in cases of practices restricting competition, practices infringing collective consumer interests and in which fines are imposed for violation of the competition and consumer protection Act. It presents them once it has finished gathering evidence in a case, setting out factual and legal grounds for the charges it is bringing and the evidence supporting these charges. This is intended to provide the party to a proceeding the opportunity to comment on the charges before a decision is issued. UOKiK has thus far provided the justification of charges in two cases.

In observance of World Competition Day, we point readers to other documents UOKiK has published this year as part of its mission to be transparent and open. They include clarifications on and explanations of: UOKiK’s rules for contact with enterprises, its use of the detailed justification of charges, voluntary settlement by enterprises, the issuance of commitment decisions in competition restricting practices cases, the rules for publishing information on the results of market inquiries, notifying the Authority of the intention to carry out an acquisition, the rules of UOKiK’s activity on Twitter and its rules governing the publication of court judgments.

Additional information for the media:

Press Office, UOKiK
Pl. Powstańców Warszawy 1, 00-950 Warsaw
Phone.: +48 22 827 28 92, +48 22 55 60 314, +48 22 55 60 430
E-mail: [SCODE]Yml1cm9wcmFzb3dlQHVva2lrLmdvdi5wbA==[ECODE]