ZWeR 2025, 389
Extraterritorial Administrative Jurisdiction in Public International Law – The Antitrust Perspective
The number of competition authorities applying national competition law extraterritorially has grown significantly in recent years. This increasingly concerns cases in which several antitrust authorities and courts get involved in the same cases around the world simultaneously. This sometimes even concerns jurisdictions in which the infringement had minor or no appreciable effects at all. Such developments can increase the risk of international policy conflicts. The coherence, effectiveness, and efficiency of the international antitrust order, however, depend on predictable and reasonable approaches. This is especially true for instruments like remedies decisions, settlements, and leniency programs. An uncoordinated, multipolar enforcement landscape, where agencies pursue overlapping actions independently, risks undermining these tools. Against this backdrop, our study describes the prerequisites and limits of extraterritorial application of competition law, not least with regard to the “effects doctrine” and the idea of comity. Above all, the study explains that qualified requirements regarding the impact on domestic circumstances must be met in order to grant a right to extraterritorial application. The authority pursuing this claim bears the burden of proof for these requirements to be met.
Contents
- I. Introduction and overview
- II. Contents and limits of the competence to apply competition law extraterritorially
- 1. Preliminary observations
- 2. Extraterritorial application of competition law as “adjudicative jurisdiction”
- 3. “Adjudicative jurisdiction” only within the scope of permissible “prescriptive jurisdiction”
- 4. Scope and limits of “extraterritorial prescriptive jurisdiction”
- 4.1 Background: Principles of sovereign equality, self-determination and non-interference
- 4.2 Function and objectives of the rules of international law on jurisdiction
- 4.3 Extraterritorial application of law as a decision requiring justification
- 5. The “effects”-doctrine
- 5.1 “Effects”-based jurisdiction as extraterritorial exercise of jurisdiction
- 5.2 International legal recognition of the “effects”-doctrine
- 5.3 Nature, intensity and foreseeability of the impact
- 5.3.1 Public international law doctrine
- 5.3.2 State law practice
- 5.3.3 Elaboration of the “effects”-doctrine
- 5.3.4 Applicability of a three-step test
- 5.3.5 Precedence of territorial jurisdictional sovereignty?
- 6. In the absence of an effect: inadmissibility of extraterritorial regulation, extraterritorial application of law and extraterritorial assessment of behavior
- III. Limits of the use of jurisdiction under international law
- 1. The “reasonableness”-test/balancing of interests under international law?
- 1.1 Conceptual underpinnings
- 1.2 Decisional practice confirming the balancing test
- 1.3 Decisional practice denying a balancing of interests test
- 1.4 Corollary
- 2. General principles of international law?
ZWeR 2025, 390
- IV. Membership in a “community of states”, mutual respect and “comity”
- 1. Respect and consideration as structural principles of a “community of states”
- 2. Mutual respect and consideration in the extraterritorial application of competition law
- 3. Concretizing comity in an antitrust enforcement context
- 3.1 Role of international agreements, policy initiatives, and case examples
- 3.2 EU-US agreements
- 3.3 OECD policy recommendations
- 3.4 OECD case examples
- 3.5 Comity in the 2017 U.S. Antitrust Guidelines for International Enforcement and Cooperation
- 3.6 EU-South Korea Comity Agreement
- 4. Conclusions on comity in antitrust
- V. Summary
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- *)Professor Dr., Chair in Constitutional and Administrative Law, European Law and International Law, Law Faculty, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.
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- **)Professor Dr., Chair in Private Law, Commercial Law, Competition and Insurance Law, Law Faculty, Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen.This article is based on a legal expert opinion delivered by the authors.
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