On 20 November 2025 at 2 pm CET (Brussels time) we invite all ASCOLA Members to join us for the third ASCOLA NOEL – the November Online Event Live!
The theme this year is “Politics and Competition Law”. The event will be held at 14:00 CET on November 20 on Zoom. Joining details were sent via the newsletter. If you did not receive them, please contact Magali.Eben@glasgow.ac.uk. We are honoured to have four speakers to share with us their perspectives on politics and competition law.
Speakers:
Viktoria Robertson, Maciej Bernatt, John Newman, Soojin Nam
Chair: Professor Thomas Cheng
ASCOLA Noel 2025 will focus on a topic that is taking on increasing salience in today’s world: competition law and politics. This 90-minute roundtable discussion will explore the phenomenon of the increasing politicization of competition law enforcement across the globe. There was a time when using competition law enforcement as a political tool can be said to be the exception rather than the rule. That is no longer the case. The politicization of competition law enforcement is seemingly no longer a taboo even among many of the established jurisdictions. This phenomenon has called into question the long-cherished premise that competition law enforcement is and is meant to be a technocratic endeavor and has profound and wide-ranging implications for competition law enforcement. This event will examine a number of questions raised by this development, such as the extent to which this is a truly recent development, whether this is an irreversible trend, and whether anything can be done within the competition law community about it.