Summary
Keywords
Actions for annulment - Natural or legal persons - Measures of direct and individual concern to them - Regulation fixing a specific agricultural conversion rate in the sugar sector - No rate fixed for a Member State - Action by a grower and a growers' association in that State - Inadmissible
(EC Treaty, Art. 173, fourth para.; Commission Regulation No 1734/95)
Summary
An action for annulment brought by a sugar beet grower against Regulation No 1734/95 fixing, for the 1994/95 marketing year, the specific agricultural conversion rate applicable to the minimum sugar beet prices and the production levy and additional levy in the sugar sector is inadmissible in so far as that regulation does not fix a conversion rate applicable to the Member State from which the grower in question comes.
That regulation is, by its very nature, of general application. It applies by reason of an objective situation and produces legal effects vis-à-vis categories of persons considered in a general and abstract manner. A measure does not lose its nature as a regulation where the number and identity of the traders concerned might in theory have been known to the institution responsible for the measure at the time when it was adopted, as long as it is established that such application takes effect by virtue of an objective legal or factual situation defined by the measure in relation to its purpose. The fact that a measure applying objectively may have different specific effects on various categories of traders is also not inconsistent with its nature as a regulation.
Nor are the conditions satisfied which would allow the applicant to be regarded as individually concerned by that regulation, since he is not affected in his legal position by reason of circumstances in which he is differentiated from all other persons and distinguished individually as in the case of an addressee, in view of the fact that he is concerned only in his objective capacity as a grower within the sugar sector in the same way as any other grower in that sector.
An action for annulment brought against that same regulation by an association of sugar beet growers is also inadmissible since such an association is not entitled to bring an action where its members may not do so individually, the defence of common interests being insufficient in that regard.
Full & Egal Universal Law Academy