Keywords
Summary

Keywords

Appeals - Pleas in law - Grounds of a judgment tainted by breach of Community law - Revocation of an administrative act - Conditions - Observance of a reasonable period - Observance of the principle of protection of legitimate expectations - Date to be taken into account with regard to the acquisition of legitimate expectations by the addressee of an administrative act - Appeal well founded

Summary

Revocation of a favourable administrative act is generally subject to very strict conditions. While it must be acknowledged that any Community institution which finds that a measure which it has just adopted is tainted by illegality has the right to withdraw it within a reasonable period, with retroactive effect, that right may be restricted by the need to fulfil the legitimate expectations of a beneficiary of the measure, who has been led to rely on the lawfulness thereof. The operative time for determining whether the addressee of an administrative act has acquired legitimate expectations is not the date on which the act was adopted or withdrawn but the date on which it was notified.

Legitimate expectations as to the legality of a favourable administrative act, once acquired, may not subsequently be undermined. In the circumstances of the case, there is no public-policy interest which overrides the beneficiary's interest in the maintenance of a situation which he was entitled to regard as stable. There is nothing to suggest that the appellant provoked the decision by means of false or incomplete information.

Accordingly, the Court of First Instance erred in law in finding that, whereas, on the date on which a decision was revoked nearly three months after it was adopted, the appellant was still entitled to rely upon the apparent legality of the decision and to claim that it should be upheld and that that reliance was subsequently, and very swiftly, undermined in such a way that at the date when the Parliament took the contested decision to revoke, the appellant was no longer entitled to entertain any legitimate expectation as to the legality of the decision revoked.