In the period January 17-18, 2024 in Sarajevo, the Competition Council of Bosnia and Herzegovina, with the support of the TAIEX Secretariat, organized a workshop entitled „EU Competition Law and its implementation into domestic legislation“.

The lecturers at the Workshop were experts from the Agency for the Protection of Market Competition in Croatia (AZTN), Mirta Kapural PhD, President of the Council and M.Sc. Branimira Kovačević, Head of the Agency’s International cooperation department.

The topic of the Workshop was the harmonization of domestic legislation with the EU legislation in the field of competition, challenges that arise in practice along the way, as well as lessons learned and useful experiences, which were discussed by lecturers from the Republic of Croatia during the two-day Workshop.

The President of the Competition Council, Adisa Begić, opened the workshop with an opening address, thanking the attendees for their great interest in this Workshop, after which Aida Mujagić, Expert Adviser for Competition, briefly presented the legislative framework for the protection of competition in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its application in practice, with a special reference to the current challenges in the Law enforcement.

During the workshop, President Kapural and M.Sc. Kovačević spoke about the harmonization of the competition law of the Republic of Croatia with the acquis of the EU during the process of accession to the EU, the strengthening of the institutional capacities of AZTN and the application of European practice in the field of competition. Particularly interesting were the lectures on the detection of prohibited competitive activities of undertakings with an emphasis on cartels in public procurement procedures along with the presentation of concrete cases from practice. Procedures for uncovering collusive agreements of bidders and proving cartels are particularly emphasized. This topic created a great interest of the participants and stimulated an active discussion.

In addition to employees from the Competition Council, the workshop was attended by a large number of participants from other institutions of all levels of government. The Competition Council cooperates and exchanges information with many of them, and some of them also participated as parties in the proceedings conducted by the Competition Council. Therefore, it turned out that inter-institutional cooperation is a topic of particular importance, especially in the light of giving opinions and recommendations on any aspect of competition, which is one of the competences of the Competition Council prescribed by the Law.

The active participation of the workshop participants indicated the need to devote more attention to individual topics in the future, which certainly supports the plans of the Competition Council to continue with the practice of organizing workshops and seminars of this type.