China's anti-monopoly law came into effect a little more than a year ago. Since then, many observers in the West have been primarily concerned with how the Chinese government will use the law to scrutinize global mergers and acquisition activity. But Peter Yuen, a Hong Kong partner at Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer, has been tracking a number of cases in which individual Chinese lawyers, many of them active in consumer rights issues, have used an article of the new law to bring private actions against large Chinese companies, including China Mobile, Baidu and China Netcom. Yuen thinks the proliferation of such cases may eventually require the Supreme People's Court to issue an interpretation of the anti-monopoly law. Though China does not have a common law system, Supreme Court interpretations are essentially binding on lower Chinese courts.
If individual private antitrust cases are permitted in China, Yuen figures the next step will be for lawyers to target major multinationals operating in China.
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