The proliferation of the sanctioning activity from the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce in the issue of restrictive practices of competition as a result of the issuance of Law 1340 of 2009, has caused, in turn, increased judicial activity by virtue of which the administrative litigation jurisdiction conducts judicial control of these actions from the administration. As a result of reviewing some of the aforementioned judicial decisions, concern arose to analyze the way in which judges are carrying out judicial control of these specific sanctioning acts of the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce, since it was noted that most of them and confirmed by the respective judge, who in his reasoning gave prevalence to the actions of the administration, limiting himself to reproduce the administrative act demanded to the detriment of the arguments presented by the plaintiffs. Consequently, in this research an important sample of judicial decisions is analyzed in order to determine whether, when carrying out judicial control of sanctioning acts issued by the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce, judges are deferential in favor of the administration, if there are deficiencies in the way in which the jurisdiction carries out control or if, on the contrary, judges carry out a comprehensive, full and unrestricted judicial control. Prior to the above, this research addresses the concept of judicial deference taking as a parameter its development in foreign legal systems; it also studies the way in which, in accordance with the law and jurisprudence, judicial control of the sanctioning acts of the administration in Colombia has been exercised and, based on this, formulates the bases for the purpose of determining, according to the Colombian legal system, how the referred judicial control ought to be. The results of the investigation produce various conclusions, among which the finding of an important sample that denotes profound deficiencies in the judicial control of the administrative sanctioning acts issued by the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce in the field of protecting free competition stands out, which suggests an alert that deserves to be heeded by academia and, in general, by the various users of justice.
