Keywords
Summary

Keywords

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Officials ° Competitions ° Selection board ° Rejection of candidature ° Obligation to state reasons ° Scope ° Observance of the secrecy of the board' s proceedings

(Staff Regulations, Art. 25; Annex III, Art. 6)

Summary

The purpose of the obligation to state the reasons for a decision affecting an individual taken pursuant to the Staff Regulations is, first, to provide the person concerned with sufficient details to allow him to ascertain whether or not the decision is well founded and, secondly, to make it possible for the decision to be the subject of judicial review. As far as concerns decisions taken by a selection board in a competition, the obligation to state reasons must be reconciled with observance of the secrecy surrounding the proceedings of selection boards which precludes both disclosure of the attitudes adopted by individual members of selection boards and disclosure of any factors relating to individual or comparative assessments of candidates.

The obligation to state the reasons on which decisions of a selection board in a competition are based must take account of the nature of the proceedings, which involves as a rule at least two separate stages, the first being an examination of the applications in order to select the candidates admitted to the competition and the second being an examination of the abilities of the candidates for the posts to be filled in order to draw up a list of suitable candidates. The first stage, particularly where the competition is based on formal qualifications, consists in comparing the diplomas or other certificates of qualifications provided by the candidates with the qualifications required by the notice of competition.

Since that comparison is made on the basis of objective factors which are moreover known to each candidate in his own case, observance of the secrecy surrounding the proceedings of the selection board does not preclude those objective factors and in particular of the criteria for assessment upon which the selection made at the stage of the preliminary proceedings in the competition was based from being communicated to the candidates concerned. By contrast, the secrecy inherent in the board' s proceedings precludes the communication of the criteria for marking the competition tests, which form an integral part of the comparative assessments made by the jury of the candidates' respective merits.

In those circumstances, communication to the candidates of the marks obtained in the various tests, which reflect the assessments made of them by the selection board, constitutes an adequate statement of the reasons on which the board' s decisions are based.