10 March 2017

On 3-4 March 2017, two capacity-building workshops organised by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) took place in Tunis, Tunisia. The workshops focused on modern public procurement enforcement and gathered members of the Higher Authority for Public Procurement (HAICOP) including from the Tunisian review body COSEM and the Tunisian eProcurement platform TUNEPS.

Eliza Niewiadomska, Senior Counsel from the Legal Transition Programme at the EBRD, lead a team of international and local experts who shared the experience of France, Italy, Poland, Portugal and Ukraine in the monitoring and the enforcing of public procurement.

The first workshop, on 3 March 2017, was opened by the President of the HAICOP, Mr Khaled Elarbi and the Head of the Tunisian Review Body COSEM, Mr Habib Dridi.

Eliza Niewiadomska gave a presentation on international best practice for review procedures in public procurement: in the European Union and the legal standards of the World Trade Organization Agreement on Government Procurement.

EBRD international expert Olivier Moreau in his presentation, elaborated on the UNCITRAL Model Law standards on review in public procurement, while Pedro Viana, Philippe Rees and Tiziana Bianchi described public procurement review and remedies in Portugal, France and Italy.

The second workshop, on 4 March 2017, focused on best practice for establishing successful public procurement enforcement. The workshop also focused on review mechanisms in the context of small and high-value as well as aggregated procurement.

EBRD expert Dmitry Palamarchuk in his presentation demonstrated the effectiveness of public procurement monitoring on the Ukrainian electronic platform Prozorro.

Finally, Philippe Rees addressed the topic of remedies in the French context in his presentation.