61996B0191(01)

Procedure - Intervention - Interested parties - Assessment by the Community judicature of the interest to intervene

(EC Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 37, second para.; Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance, Art. 115)

The interest of a party seeking leave to intervene, within the meaning of the second paragraph of Article 37 of the Statute of the Court of Justice, falls to be defined in the light of the actual subject-matter of the dispute in question. For the purposes of granting leave to intervene, the Community judicature must ascertain, in the case of an action for annulment, whether the applicant for such leave is directly affected by the contested decision and whether his interest in the result of the case is established. Similarly, the prospective intervener must establish a direct, existing interest in the grant of the order as sought and not an interest in relation to the pleas in law put forward. The interest necessary in this respect must not relate merely to abstract legal arguments but to the actual form of order sought by a party to the main action.

More specifically, it is necessary to distinguish between prospective interveners establishing a direct interest in the ruling on the specific act whose annulment is sought and those who can establish only an indirect interest in the result of the case by means of similarities between their situation and that of one of the parties. In that respect, the mere fact that an economic operator finds himself in a situation analogous to that of the applicant, in particular in that it claims to have suffered damage as a result of the same Community act, and that the case in which he seeks leave to intervene could give rise to a judgment whose grounds might influence the manner in which the defendant institution would deal with his own situation is not, in itself, sufficient to establish an interest to intervene for the purposes of the aforementioned provision.