Antitrust proceedings Official Languages

Official languages in antitrust proceedings. General Rules

Official languages of the European Union include virtually all the official languages of the various EU Member States. Council Regulation No 1 of 15 April 1958 determining the language to be used by the European Economic Community, as amended on a number of occasions (as a result of the various EU enlargements), 1 lists the following 23 official languages (in alphabetical order): Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish.

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As a result, the Official Journal of the European Union exists in all these languages. EU regulations and other documents of general application (directives, for instance) are published in the official languages. There is however an exception for Irish (until 1 January 2012): before that date, only regulations adopted jointly by the European Parliament and Council (not relevant for DG Competition's activities) had to be published in Irish. For other types of acts, such as all acts prepared by DG Competition the institutions of the European Union were not bound to publish in Irish 2 .

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A Member State or a European citizen can write to an EU institution in any of the official languages listed above. The reply should be drafted in the same language 3 (so for example, a Bulgarian citizen can write to the Commission in Spanish and will receive a reply in that language).

Resources

See Also

References

• Information about Antitrust proceedings Official Languages in the Antitrust Manual of Procedures for the application of Articles 101 and 102 TFEU (Internal DG Competition)

Notes

[Note 1] OJ 17, 6.10.1958, p. 385-386, as amended by Regulation No 1791/2006.
[Note 2] Article 2 of Council Regulation (EC) No 920/2005 of 13 June 2005, OJ L 156 , 18.06.2005, p. 3.
[Note 3] See, with regard to Member States, Article 2 of Regulation No 1 and, with regard to European citizens, Article 24 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and Article 2 of Regulation No 1.

Further Reading

• Information about Antitrust proceedings Official Languages in “An Introduction to EU Competition Law”, Moritz Lorenz (Cambridge University Press)