Keywords
Summary

Keywords

1. Appeals - Grounds - Review by the Court of the assessment of items of information - Excluded save where the clear sense of the evidence has been distorted

2. Community law - Principles - Rights of the defence - Principle of the right to a hearing - Observance in the case of the adoption and publication of reports of the Court of Auditors

3. Court of Auditors - Reports - Naming of third parties in a report - Conditions - Review by the Community judicature - Scope

Summary

1. The Court of First Instance is the sole judge of any need for the information available to it concerning the cases before it to be supplemented. Whether or not the evidence before it is convincing is a matter to be appraised by it alone and is not subject to review by the Court of Justice on appeal, except where the clear sense of that evidence has been distorted or the substantive inaccuracy of the Court of First Instance's findings is apparent from the documents in the case-file.

( see para. 19 )

2. The principle of the right to a hearing is a general principle of law whose observance is ensured by the Court of Justice. It applies to any procedure which may result in a decision by a Community institution perceptibly affecting a person's interests.

Although the adoption and publication of reports of the Court of Auditors are not decisions directly affecting the rights of persons mentioned therein, they are capable of having consequences for those persons such that those concerned must be enabled to make observations on those points in such reports which refer to them by name, before those reports are definitively drawn up.

( see paras 28-29 )

3. There may be specific circumstances, which may be due to the seriousness of the facts or the risk of confusion liable to harm the interests of third parties, where the Court of Auditors is allowed to mention by name in its reports persons who in principle are not subject to its supervision, subject to the condition that such persons are entitled to a right to a hearing.

It is for the Community judicature in an action brought before it to assess in such a case whether the naming of persons was necessary and proportionate to the objective pursued by publication of the report. The full power of review which it exercises in that connection falls within its untrammelled appraisal of the facts against which no appeal lies except where there is a substantive inaccuracy in the findings of fact or the clear sense of the evidence in the case-file has been distorted.

( see paras 40-41 )