Suchergebnisse

The preservation of plurality of political opinions in operations of concentration in the media sector

This paper addresses the legal framework of the internal market of the European Community, in special economic freedoms (free movement of goods, persons, services and capital) and their exceptions, as well as competition law concerns such as antitrust and cartels (the elimination of agreements which restrict competition - e.g. pricefixing agreements, or cartels, between competitors -, and of abuses by firms who hold a dominant position on the market), merger control (the control of mergers between firms - e.g. a merger between two large groups which would result in their dominating the market), liberalization (introducing competition in monopolistic economic sectors - e.g. telecommunications), and state aid control (the control of state aid measures by Member State governments to ensure that such measures do not distort competition in the Common Market - e.g. the prohibition of a state grant designed to keep a loss-making firm in business even though it has no prospect of recovery). Moreover, it provides an overview of the general framework of European electronic commerce law, addressing issues such as, namely, the single market of information society services, contract and liability law, consumer protection, and intellectual property.

Phone tapping has been an evolving issue concerning the protection of the right of privacy under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. In several cases, namely Klass, Malone and Kruslin&Huvig, the European Court of Human Rights did set up a number of requirements that national legislations must comply with concerning the admissibility of telephone-tapping as an important tool of criminal procedure, since it is understood as an infringement of the right of privacy provided by Article 8 of the ECHR, despite its wording. Moreover, the Court did also establish the requirements for the use illegally collected evidence (i.e. evidence collected without compliance of phone-tapping requirements), which are different from the American exclusionary rules ("Miranda's Rights" Doctrine) and the German «Beweisverbote» (the BGH «evaluation of interests» Criteria and the Doctrine of the "three spheres of privacy"). At the same time, in case Schenk, the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) seemed to reject a strict application of the doctrine of the "fruit of the poisonous tree" (US Supreme Court) and the BGH "Fernwirkung" criteria. This paper, originally drafted for European Criminal Law at the Catholic University of Leuven as Erasmus student, questions whether the impact of the ECHR's case-law on national legislation of Member States is not leading towards a Uniform European Criminal Law.