The human rights of persons with mental disabilities represents a frontier area for legal protection. The content and means of enforcing their rights have become topics of both scholarly and popular concern. For two decades, the international community has grappled — somewhat fitfully — with the human rights norms that should guide nations in their care and treatment of these vulnerable groups. International concern has focused not only on problems of arbitrary detention and cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment, but on issues of institutionalization, sterilization, and a broad array of education, treatment and welfare services.

In many countries, obsolete legislation and service delivery models have hindered the realization of both negative and affirmative (“positive resource claims”) human rights.

The competition rules of the European Community are set out in Articles 85 and 86 of the Treaty of Rome. The first forbids, as incompatible with the common market, agreements that may affect trade between member states and restrict competition; the second the abuse of a dominant position. Articles 85 and 86 are the starting point of an intricate regulatory system which affects not only naked horizontal cartels and abusive behaviour by dominant undertakings but also distribution agreements, franchise agreements, the licensing and exercise of intellectual property rights, joint ventures and other forms of collaboration between undertakings.

This article attempts to denote the scope of the Community's jurisdiction in competition law matters as it is shaped and moulded in the judgments of the European Court of Justice (hereinafter referred to as the “Court”) as well as to evaluate whether the scope of jurisdiction awarded by the traditional jurisdictional tests can be justified on grounds other than legal conservatism.