About us
The Competition Law Research Centre was established in 2006 at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University. Since its establishment, the faculty has paid special attention to ensuring that the newest areas of law are at the forefront of the curriculum, and has been at the forefront of competition law education. It is in this tradition and spirit that the Research Centre was established, to be at the forefront of research in competition law and policy, in addition to teaching. At its inception, a complex organisational structure was put in place to ensure the broad involvement of theoreticians and practitioners in the activities of the Centre. Almost all major players in modern Hungarian competition law have been directly or indirectly involved in our work.
In its time, the Centre was the only research centre in Central and Eastern Europe focusing on competition law and policy. In addition to academic research, the Centre also played a major role in organising academic and practical events, and international conferences were organised to ensure that, initially annually and then every two years, the focus was on classic areas of competition law and unfair commercial practices. The international conferences bring together leading competition authorities from around the world, from the US Department of Justice to the UK Competition Bureau, to Italian, German, Austrian, French, Dutch and even Polish competition authorities and practitioners. For nearly 10 years, we have organised an annual competition law conference focusing on competition law developments specifically in the Central and Eastern European region. Our conferences regularly feature presentations from top judges, public authorities and leading competition law partners from major international law firms.
Meanwhile, in addition to traditional undergraduate competition law education, specialised competition law education has been established in the framework of the competition law specialist lawyer training, and competition law as a subject has also been introduced in other specialist lawyer training courses. Our members have also conducted international and domestic judge training courses as part of our teaching activities. As a result of our outstanding and persistent work in the Department, we have also developed the Jean Monnet teaching module under the European Commission's most prestigious education and research support programme, and the Department of Environmental Law and Competition Law is currently operating as a Jean Monnet Chair, directly supported by the European Commission. In the meantime, more than 20 research projects have been carried out at the Centre, including three funded by the National Fund for Scientific Research, but the Centre has also been involved in dozens of other research projects organised by other departments or universities.
In the second half of the last decade, the Centre shifted its focus to basic research in competition law and policy, given that its pioneering role in conferences and events was no longer needed, as other regional and national organisations were also engaged in similar activities. In addition to the practical aspects, the focus was also on basic research, such as the role of fundamental rights, the competition sanction system and, more recently, research into data ownership, information technology and the behaviour of large technology companies. Google, Facebook, Apple and Amazon have, it is fair to say, been caught in the crossfire in the last year, and it is competition law that is one of the main regulators of the behaviour of these technology companies.
From its inception, the Research Centre has integrated the greatest competition lawyers of our time, so that, without wishing to be exhaustive, we have had among our members from the very beginning Györgyné Boytha, Tihamért Tóth and Imre Vörös, as well as Zoltán Hegymegi-Barakonyi and Gábor Fejes. In the first decade of the 2000s, the Centre integrated nearly 40 members. In the last five years, we have mainly strengthened our basic research and have a smaller active membership.
Dr. Szilágyi Pál, Ph.D., LL.M.
Director of the Competition Law Research Center and Associate Professor of Law and Political Science at Pázmány Péter Catholic University, where he teaches competition law & policy and European Union law. He obtained his law degree at PPKE JÁK, then obtained postgraduate diploma in European law at the University of Cambridge, competition law at King's College London, and an LL.M. in Competition Law degree at the latter institution. Pál is the program director of the PPKE JÁK competition law specialist training, the author of numerous domestic and foreign publications.
Dr. Tóth Tihamér, Ph.D.
Tihamér Tóth teaches competition law, consumer protection law and the law of administrative sanctions at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences of Pázmány Péter Catholic University in Budapest. He is also Deputy Dean for International Relations at the Faculty. As an invited lecturer, he has taught courses on competition law at the University of Notre Dame, Loyola Chicago University, Catholic University of Leuven and Catholic University of Lyon. In collaboration with his colleague Pal Szilágyi, Tihamér has managed various Hungarian and EU research projects. In 2019, he was appointed Jean Monnet Chair by the EU Commission. He is the co-author of three handbooks on Hungarian and EU competition law.
As a lawyer, he heads the Competition and Antitrust Practice Group in the Budapest office of Dentons. As a practitioner, he focuses primarily on advising international businesses on almost the full spectrum of Hungarian and European competition and antitrust law, including unfair competition, merger clearance, cartel and state aid cases. He is rated (awarded?) as a "Practitioner of Excellence" in the field of "Competition/Antitrust" by Chambers Europe.
He received his law degree in 1994 and his PhD in 2011 from the University of Szeged. He is Chairman of the Scientific Council of the Centre for Competition Law Research and a member of the Scientific Committee of the International Competition Law Association. Tihamér was the President of the Competition Council of the Hungarian Competition Authority (GVH). He has more than 15 years of experience in government work at the European Bureau of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Hungarian Competition Authority.
Dr. Dömötörfy Borbála Tünde, Ph.D., LL.M.
He graduated in law in 2011 and defended his doctoral thesis at Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2021. He studied at the law faculties of Radboud University Nijmegen and Université Paris Sud (Paris XI) and holds an LLM in Competition Law and Intellectual Property Law from the Université de Liege bilingual (English-French) course. In addition to his law studies, he also holds a BSc in Economics from the University of London (The London School of Economics and Political Science), 2021, through distance learning. He started working in competition law as a fourth-year student in 2009 as a demonstrator in the Department of Environmental and Competition Law, and over the last 12 years has gained experience as an investigator in the Antitrust Office of the GVH, at the European Commission, at an international law firm, in the legal department of a multinational company and in academia.
Dr. Firniksz Judit, MSc, LL.M
Judit Firniksz started working in the field of competition law in 1996 during her studies at the Budapest University of Economics. She started her professional career at the Office of Economic Competition, where she spent nearly a decade as an investigator in the Competition Policy Bureau, then as Senior Senior Investigator in the Secretariat of the Deputy President and as Head of the Consumer Protection Bureau. During his years in the Competition Bureau, he studied law at the Eötvös Loránd University, obtaining his law degree in 2006.
As a senior lawyer, Judit spent fifteen years at the law firm Réti, Várszegi & Partners, in cooperation with PwC, where she headed the competition group. In addition to classical antitrust cases, her practice focused on sector-specific (in particular pharmaceuticals, energy, large retail chains) regulation and competition law interface issues. The issues arising in daily practice in the context of e-commerce and digital markets encouraged him to systematise and deepen his professional knowledge in the framework of the PhD programme at the PPKE JÁK from autumn 2019. His research interests include the regulation of digital markets.
dr. Oroszi Fanni
Since 2019, Fanni has been a doctoral student at the Pázmány Péter Catholic University's Doctoral School of Law and Political Sciences, and a junior lawyer at the Budapest office of an international law firm. She obtained her law degree from Pázmány Péter Catholic University in 2017 and her LL.M. degree in European Law and Economic Analysis from the College of Europe in Bruges in 2020. Fanni's research focuses on the impact of digitalisation on competition law and policy. Following her graduation in 2017, she worked in several international law firms in Budapest, Brussels and Paris and gained experience on the regulatory side at the European Commission's Directorate-General for Competition and the European Competition Authority.