Common characteristics of enforcement cooperation agreements

Enforcement cooperation as a substitute for harmonisation of competition laws

Bilateral (and trilateral) enforcement cooperation agreements are agreements that do not harmonise the competition laws of the contracting parties. These agreements provide for mechanisms of enforcement cooperation. In the field of competition law enforcement cooperation has been used as an alternative for the harmonisation of national competition laws. Since no agreement on a multilateral code on restrictive business practices could be achieved in the last century, a number of countries with active international trade (through multinational firms) and a developed competition law cooperated on enforcement of their competition laws in order to confront the consequences of the increasing number of restrictive business practices with an international effect.

Thus, as early as the late 1950s when a conflict arose between the governments of Canada and the United States in a case relating to a US investigation of a patent pool among Canadian radio and television makers designed to exclude US manufactured products from the Canadian market, the governments of the United States and Canada entered into negotiations in order to coordinate their enforcement activities and avoid similar conflicts. The outcome of this case and the subsequent negotiations was the Fulton-Rodgers understanding of 1959, in which the two governments agreed to construct a channel of communication regarding antitrust matters, through notification and consultation.