Summary
Parties
Grounds
Decision on costs
Operative part
Keywords
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Procedure ° Interpretation of a judgment ° Conditions governing admissibility of the application
(Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance, Art. 129)
Summary
An application for interpretation of a judgment must, in order to be admissible, concern the operative part of the judgment in question, together with the essential grounds, and seek to resolve an obscurity or ambiguity that may affect the meaning or scope of that judgment, in so far as the Court was required to decide the particular case before it.
Such an application is therefore inadmissible where it relates to matters not decided by the judgment concerned or seeks to obtain from the Court in question an opinion on the application, implementation or consequences of its judgment.
Parties
In Case T-22/91 INT,
Inès Raiola-Denti, Marie-Thérèse de Cuyper-Pirotte, Lieve De Nil, Everdien Diks, Alma Forsyth, Claudine Hendrickx, Christiane Impens, Rita Talloen, Danielle Vandenameele, officials of the Council of the European Communities, residing in Brussels, represented by Gérard Collin, Michel Deruyver and Jean-Noël Louis, of the Brussels Bar, with an address for service in Luxembourg at the offices of Fiduciaire Myson Sarl, 1 Rue Glesener,
applicants,
v
Council of the European Communities, represented by Yves Crétien, Legal Adviser, acting as Agent, with an address for service in Luxembourg at the office of Bruno Eynard, Manager of the Legal Affairs Directorate of the European Investment Bank, 100 Boulevard Konrad Adenauer,
defendant,
APPLICATION for an interpretation of the judgment of the Court of First Instance (Fifth Chamber) of 11 February 1993 in Case T-22/91 Raiola-Denti and Others v Council [1993] ECR II-69,
THE COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE
OF THE EUROPEAN COMMUNITIES (Fifth Chamber),
composed of: D.P.M. Barrington, President, K. Lenaerts and A. Kalogeropoulos, Judges,
Registrar: H. Jung,
makes the following
Order
Grounds
1 By application received at the Court Registry on 2 June 1993, Inès Raiola-Denti and eight other officials of the Council of the European Communities, the applicants in Case T-22/91, applied under Article 129 of the Rules of Procedure for interpretation of the judgment of the Court of First Instance (Fifth Chamber) of 11 February 1993 in that case ([1993] ECR II-69).
2 By that judgment, the Court of First Instance, upholding the application for annulment of "the decisions of the Selection Board taken following the decisions on admission to the tests in the competition", annulled "all the steps taken following the decisions admitting candidates to the tests in Internal Competition B/228, which was organized by the Council and the notice of which was published in Staff Note No 100/90 of 26 October 1990".
3 In the present application for interpretation, the applicants seek a ruling from the Court as to "which of the steps taken following the decisions admitting candidates to the tests in the competition have been annulled". They give as the reason for their application the fact that an interpreting judgment (second subparagraph of Article 129(3) of the Rules of Procedure) from the Court of First Instance may enable them "to determine whether the measures adopted by the Council to comply with the judgment of 11 February 1993 in Case T-22/91 are consistent with Article 176 of the EEC Treaty ...".
4 In its observations lodged at the Court Registry on 30 June 1993, the Council submits that the application for interpretation is inadmissible and contends that it should therefore be dismissed and the applicants ordered to pay the costs.
5 The Council argues on the basis of the relevant case-law of the Court of Justice that, for an application for interpretation of a judgment to be admissible, there must, first of all, be difficulties regarding the meaning and scope of that judgment and, accordingly, a need to resolve an obscurity or ambiguity. In the present case, it is clear that the annulment ordered by the Court of First Instance in Case T-22/91 concerned all the steps taken by the Selection Board for the competition after it had drawn up the list of candidates qualified to take part in the tests. Secondly, according to the Council, an application for interpretation must seek an interpretation of the judgment in question and not an opinion from the Community judicature on the application, implementation or consequences of that judgment. In so far as the applicants state that the purpose of their application for interpretation is to enable them to determine whether the measures taken by the Council to comply with the judgment in question satisfy the requirements of Article 176 of the EEC Treaty, it follows that their application is inadmissible, a fortiori since the Council has not yet adopted any such measures.
6 It should be noted that, as the Court of Justice has consistently held, an application for interpretation of a judgment must, in order to be admissible, concern the operative part of the judgment in question, and the essential grounds thereof, and seek to resolve an obscurity or ambiguity that may affect the meaning or scope of that judgment, in so far as the Court was required to decide the particular case before it. According to the same line of decisions, an application for interpretation of a judgment is therefore inadmissible where it relates to matters not decided by the judgment concerned or seeks to obtain from the Court in question an opinion on the application, implementation or consequences of its judgment (see the judgments in Case 5/55 ASSIDER v High Authority [1955] ECR 135, in Case 70/63 A High Authority v Collotti and Court of Justice [1965] ECR 275 and in Case 110/63 A Willame v EAEC Commission [1966] ECR 287; and the orders of 29 September 1983 in Case 9/81 Int Court of Auditors v Williams [1983] ECR 2859 and in Case 206/81 A Alvarez v Parliament [1983] ECR 2865, of 11 December 1986 in Case 25/86 Suss v Commission [1986] ECR 3929 and of 20 April 1988 in Joined Cases 146/85 and 431/85 Int Maindiaux and Others v ESC and Others [1988] ECR 2003).
7 In the present case, the applicants are seeking an interpretation from the Court of First Instance of the operative part of the judgment of 11 February 1993 identifying the measures which were thereby annulled.
8 It should be noted, first of all, that the applicants do not allege in support of their application that the operative part of the judgment of 11 February 1993, and the essential grounds thereof, are marred by an obscurity or ambiguity.
9 Secondly, in their application for annulment of the steps taken by the Selection Board for Internal Competition B/228, organized by the Council, the applicants claimed that the Court should annul "the decisions of the Selection Board taken following the decisions on admission to the tests in the competition". They accordingly applied to the Court of First Instance for annulment of all the steps taken in the competition at issue following the adoption by the Selection Board for the competition of decisions as to which candidates qualified for admission to the tests. Those decisions were not covered, therefore, by their claim for annulment. Since the applicants themselves had specified, in the manner described above, which decisions of the Selection Board they sought to have annulled by the Court, it follows that they knew which of the decisions adopted under the competition procedure at issue ° which, "as laid down by Annex III to the Staff Regulations, closes with the establishment of the list of suitable candidates and its transmission to the appointing authority, together with a reasoned report by the Selection Board" (see the judgment of the Court of Justice in Case C-242/90 P Commission v Albani and Others [1993] ECR I-3839, paragraph 10) ° they sought to have annulled and which could therefore be the decisions related to the competition at issue that were annulled by the judgment of 11 February 1993, in which the Court of First Instance ruled that "the steps taken following the decisions admitting candidates to the tests in Internal Competition B/228 ... are annulled". The operative part of the judgment in question is not therefore marred by obscurity or ambiguity as to either its meaning or its scope, whether in itself or read in conjunction with the applicants' claims (see, to that effect, the judgment in Willame v EAEC Commission, cited above).
10 It follows that the present application for interpretation fails to satisfy the condition for admissibility requiring there to be an obscurity or ambiguity which affects the meaning and scope of the judgment whose interpretation is sought.
11 In the light of the foregoing, it is necessary only to rule on the admissibility of the application for interpretation, by way of an order, without opening the oral procedure and without there being any need to call on the parties to lodge additional observations in support of the forms of order sought by them, and to dismiss that application as inadmissible.
Decision on costs
Costs
12 Under Article 87(2) of the Rules of Procedure the unsuccessful party is to be ordered to pay the costs if they have been applied for in the successful party' s pleadings. However, Article 88 of those Rules provides that in proceedings between the Communities and their servants, the institutions are to bear their own costs.
Operative part
On those grounds,
THE COURT OF FIRST INSTANCE (Fifth Chamber)
hereby orders:
1. The application for interpretation is dismissed as inadmissible.
2. Each of the parties shall bear its own costs.
Luxembourg, 14 July 1993.
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