Keywords
Summary

Keywords

1. Actions for annulment – Natural or legal persons – Measures of direct and individual concern to them

(Art. 230, fourth para., EC)

2. European Communities – Judicial review of the legality of the acts of the institutions – Need for natural or legal persons to have recourse to a reference for a preliminary ruling on validity

(Arts 10 EC, 230, fourth para., EC and 234 EC)

Summary

1. On the basis of the fourth paragraph of Article 230 EC, a local or regional entity may, to the extent that it has legal personality under national law, institute proceedings against a decision addressed to it or against a decision which, although in the form of a regulation or a decision addressed to another person, is of direct and individual concern to it. The condition that the decision forming the subject-matter of the proceedings must be of direct concern to a natural or legal person requires the contested Community measure to affect directly the legal situation of the individual and leave no discretion to its addressees, who are entrusted with the task of implementing it, such implementation being purely automatic and resulting from Community rules without the application of other intermediate rules.

The designation of a regional or local entity as the authority responsible for the implementation of a project of the European Regional Development Fund does not imply that that entity is itself entitled to the financial assistance in question. The fact that, in the annex to the decision to grant that assistance, that regional entity is referred to as the authority responsible for the application for financial assistance is also irrelevant. The position of ‘authority responsible for the application’, to which the annex to the decision to grant refers, does not have the effect of putting that authority in a direct relationship with the Community assistance, which the same decision states moreover was applied for by the government of a Member State and granted to the latter.

(see paras 29, 31-32, 36)

2. Individuals are entitled to effective judicial protection of the rights they derive from the Community legal order. The judicial protection of natural or legal persons who are unable, by reason of the conditions for admissibility laid down in the fourth paragraph of Article 230 EC, directly to challenge Community measures must be guaranteed effectively by a right of action before national courts. Those are required, in accordance with the principle of cooperation in good faith laid down by Article 10 EC, so far as possible, to interpret and apply national procedural rules governing the exercise of rights of action in a way that enables those persons to challenge before the courts the legality of any decision or other national measure relative to the application to them of a Community act by pleading the invalidity of such an act and by asking them to make a reference to the Court of Justice for a preliminary ruling on validity.

(see para. 39)