Brussels, 05/06/2012 (Agence Europe) - The exclusion of a farmer from benefiting from agricultural aid on the ground of a false declaration of the area of his farm, as provided for in EU law, does not constitute a criminal penalty and does not preclude the imposition of a criminal penalty for the same act.
That is the substance of the ruling handed down in by the Court of Justice on Tuesday 5 June (case C-489/10) in response to the Polish Supreme Court which is hearing the case of a farmer who, because of an incorrect declaration of the extent of agricultural land cultivated in his application for agricultural sector aid from the EU, had the amount of aid applied for reduced by the Polish authorities and had criminal proceedings launched against him for subsidy fraud. The Polish court asked the Court of Justice whether the measures imposed constitute criminal penalties which, pursuant to the principle ne bis in idem (prohibition of being tried twice for the same offence) in the Polish Criminal Procedure Code, would then prevent any criminal proceedings being brought.
The Court of Justice notes that it has previously held that penalties laid down by rules of the common agricultural policy, such as the temporary exclusion of an economic operator from the benefit of an aid scheme, are not of a criminal nature. It also considers that those measures constitute a specific administrative instrument “forming an integral part of a specific scheme of aid and intend to ensure the sound financial management of public funds of the EU”. It observes that the measures do not fulfil the criteria established by the case law of the European Court of Human Rights on the concept of “criminal proceedings”: the legal classification of the offence under national law; the very nature of the offence; and the nature and degree of severity of the penalty that the person concerned is liable to incur. The measures can apply only to economic operators who have recourse to the aid scheme in question, and that the purpose of those measures is not punitive, but is essentially to protect the management of EU funds. Moreover, the sole effect of the penalties provided for by EU law is to deprive the farmer in question of the prospect of obtaining aid for the years following the one in which an irregularity has been found. (FG/transl.rt)