The Public Procurement Review Central Administrative Court

Abstract

The publication of Directive 2007/66/EC, of 11 December, of the European Parliament and of the Council, amending Directive 1989/665/EEC, of 21 December, was aimed at improving the effectiveness of the review system concerning the award of public contracts. This improvement has, among other things, given rise to the suspension of the contract award procedure until the competent authority has adopted a decision on the issue in question or on the appropriateness of maintaining the procedure suspended. With these changes the Spanish review system needed to either modify the contentious administrative procedure, at least with regard to the suspension of the contested act, or set up a specialised body with jurisdiction to resolve these reviews. The peculiarities of the contentious-administrative procedure and the considerable workload of the courts in this jurisdiction pushed the Spanish legislator to make use of the possibility contained in Directive 89/665/EEC to confer the review procedure on an independent administrative body. This marked the birth of the Public Procurement Review Central Administrative Court and the equivalent bodies set up in the autonomous regions. Their regulatory system should place emphasis on the essential requirement of effectiveness, which, apart from independence, includes the need to establish necessarily brief resolution guidelines. This is the only possible way to balance the need to recognise the claims of appellants whose reviews are upheld with the need to avoid the negative impact on public procurement of prolonging the suspension of the public procurement procedure longer than is reasonable. The article that follows seeks to answer the questions that derive from the issues raised above.