Keywords
Summary

Keywords

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Procedure ° Application initiating proceedings ° Formal requirements ° Brief statement of the grounds relied upon ° Pleas in law not set out in the application ° Reference to all the annexes ° Inadmissibility

(EEC Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 19, first para.; Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance, Art. 44(1)(c))

Summary

Pursuant to the first paragraph of Article 19 of the Protocol on the Statute of the Court of Justice and Article 44(1)(c) of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance, the application initiating the proceedings must contain the subject-matter of the dispute and a brief statement of the grounds on which the application is based. Irrespective of any question of terminology, that statement must be sufficiently clear and precise to enable the defendant to prepare its defence and the Court of First Instance to exercise its power of judicial review. The principles of both legal certainty and sound administration of justice require that the basic legal and factual particulars relied on be set out with sufficient clarity in the application itself. Whilst the body of the application may be underpinned and supplemented on specific points by references to extracts from documents annexed thereto, an overall reference to all the documents annexed to the application in order to set out the basic arguments in law does not satisfy the requirements of the Statute of the Court of Justice or the Rules of Procedure. It is not for the Court of First Instance to substitute its own assessment for that of the applicant and to attempt to seek and identify in the annexes, which have a purely evidential and instrumental function, the grounds on which it may consider the action to be based.

Pleas which have not been stated, even in summary form, in the application cannot lawfully be developed in the reply.