Keywords
Summary

Keywords

1. Appeals - Pleas in law - Plea put forward for the first time at the stage of the appeal - Inadmissible

(Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice, Arts 42(2) and 118)

2. Actions for annulment - Natural or legal persons - Measures of direct and individual concern to them - Provision fixing the derived intervention price for white sugar for all areas in Italy in respect of a particular marketing year - Action brought by Italian sugar manufacturers - Inadmissible

(EC Treaty, Art. 173, fourth para. (now, after amendment, Art. 230, fourth para.j, EC); Council Regulation No 1534/95, Art. 1(f))

Summary

1. A plea put forward for the first time in an appeal to the Court must be dismissed as inadmissible. To allow a party to put forward for the first time before the Court of Justice a plea in law which it has not raised before the Court of First Instance would be to allow it to bring before the Court, whose jurisdiction in appeals is limited, a case of wider ambit than that which came before the Court of First Instance. In an appeal the Court's jurisdiction is thus confined to review of the findings of law on the pleas argued before the Court of First Instance.

( see paras 52-53 )

2. The fact that it is possible to define more or less precisely the number or even the identity of the persons to whom a measure applies does not imply that the latter must be regarded as being individually concerned by that measure as long as it is established that such application takes effect by virtue of an objective situation of fact or of law defined by the measure in question.

Thus Article 1(f) of Regulation No 1534/95, which fixes the derived intervention price for sugar for all areas in Italy for the 1995/96 marketing year, is not of individual concern to Italian sugar manufacturers holding production quotas. First, the Council fixes the intervention prices for white sugar not on the basis of the individual data from each of the Italian manufacturers holding production quotas or by taking account of their specific situation, but on the basis of overall Italian sugar production data. Secondly, the classification of a given area as a deficit or surplus area, for which a derived intervention price and an intervention price respectively are fixed, is based ultimately on a comparison of the production and consumption forecast for the marketing year concerned. It follows that the information provided by the various Italian sugar manufacturers is only one factor in the overall data available to the Council and that the derived intervention price for white sugar is fixed in a general and abstract manner rather than on the basis of or taking into consideration the individual situation of each manufacturer.

( see paras 59, 62-63, 65 )