Judicial Review of Adherence to the Principle of Transparency in European Union Public Procurement Law

Abstract

EU Directives regarding public procurement regulate domestic procedures in terms of awarding public procurement contracts, the aim of which is to open up public procurement proceedings to competition through detailed regulation of the procedures of their awarding as part of the European Union. There are, however, some groups of public procurement contracts to which the mentioned Directives do not apply at all. Yet even then those Directives, if not limited by the principles included in the EU Directives, are still subject to the basic principles of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union and the principles they introduced. One of them is the principle of transparency which consists in the obligation to publicize a public procurement notice ahead along with appropriate information regarding its object and conditions. The information included in these notices allow business entities of the European Union to decide whether they are interested in the procurement, which shall foster the development of effective competition in the field of public procurement. The goal of the paper is to present the area of implementation of the principle of transparency in the field of public procurement and the legal possibilities of its avoidance. The questions specified above shall be discussed here on the basis of judicial decisions of the European Court of Justice and doctrinal analysis.