General principles of electronic public procurement

Duarte Amorim Pereira

Keywords

Cyberspace, regulation; internet; electronic public procurement; information technology law; general principles of law.
 

Abstract

The standing up of this “virtual world” – the twenty-first century “global village” as MCLUHAN put it –, beginning in the fifties of the twentieth century, is generally attributed to the advanced new technologies such as the Internet.
The need for regulation of “cyberspace” has thus become pressing as the number of Internet users worldwide keeps increasing impressively, especially over the last three decades – is it estimated that, in 2012, there will be over one billion of them – and, therefore, it faces the corresponding expansion of their rights and duties and of the actions and omissions in need of a legally relevant and adequate protection.
Public administration also devotes its compliance to this thriving “electronic law”, whether concerning its public unilateral  or bilateral forms of public action.
This study intends to provide the general legal framework of this electronic public procurement and to set out the general principles that should guide its development and application, conceiving the former as any public procurement that involves direct or indirect use of information and/or communication technologies.