Brussels, 29/11/2012 (Agence Europe) - The fact that recruitment competition notices for European civil servants are published in the three official EU languages (English, French and German) but not in all 23 of the EU's official languages, and the obligation for candidates to take the exams in one of these three languages, is language-based discrimination. Restrictions on the choice of the second language for a competition must be based on clear, objective and predictable criteria.
This was the substance of a ruling issued on 27 November in Case C-556/10P by the European Court of Justice, cancelling the ruling of the General Court of 13 December 2010 in combined cases T-166/07 and T-285/07 rejecting an appeal by Italy against the Commission for the publication in the EU Official Journal (OJ) in 2007 of two competition notices for the recruitment of administrators and assistants for information technology, communications and the media solely in German, English and French rather than in all 23 official EU languages. The competition rules state that invitations, correspondence between the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO) and candidates and examinations shall be in one of the three official languages only. The same conditions apply for admission to the written exams as for the running of them. Italy appealed against this General Court ruling on the grounds that the court had committed an error of law by validating the competition notices.
The Court of Justice agrees with Italy and cancelled the notices in question, but did not invalidate the results of the competitions in question in order to preserve the legitimate confidence of the selected candidates.
On the absence of publication of the competition notices in all twenty-three EU official languages, the court points out that the EU language system defines the 23 current official languages as official working languages for the EU and the OJ must be published in all official languages. Under the terms and conditions for EU officials, general competition notices must be published in the OJ and therefore the challenged competition notices should have been published in full in all official languages. No exceptions are laid down and the General Court therefore committed an error of law in ruling that the later publication of amendments in the other languages had solved the lack of full publication in all languages. A potential candidate whose mother tongue was not French, German or English would have had to get hold of the OJ in one of the said three languages in order to read the competition notice in full and would therefore be at a disadvantage compared with candidates whose mother tongue is French, German or English, both in terms of correctly understanding the competition notice and in terms of the deadline for preparing and sending in an application.
On the restrictions on the second language for the exams, the Court of Justice said that if such a restriction can be justified by the interests of the department, it should appear in the rules based on clear, objective and predictable criteria in order to enable candidates to know the language requirements in good time to be able to prepare for the exams in the best conditions. The EU institutions have never set such rule and the Commission did not explain why it had chosen the three languages in question. (FG/transl.fl)