The authors confront complexness and rigour of EU directives on public procurement vis-à-vis broad wording of international agreements concluded within EU neighbourhood policy. The firs reason for this comparison is ongoing spread of principles of the EU law to the third countries. The second reason is that both rely on the same goals: access to market ad fair environment via transparency because these principles constitute a subtle legal basis for public procurement legislation at all. Finally, these approaches were compared to the approaches employed in recent FTAs - CETA and EUSFTA. This paper is an output in a project granted by APVV-17-0641: Improvement of effectiveness of legal regulation of public procurement within EU law context