Brussels, 21/01/2015 (Agence Europe) - When calculating retirement pensions, member states can exclude the period when a person was unable, from a legal point of view, to have a pension or pay into a pension scheme.
It is on the basis of an Austrian civil servant, who sought to calculate his pension rights by taking into account the years he had spent studying before he was 18, that the European Court of Justice reached this conclusion in a ruling (C-529/13).
The interested party took the matter to court to protest against Austrian law that does not allow training periods before the age of 18 to be taken into account when calculating pension rights. The national courts subsequently turned to the European Court of Justice to see whether such a provision complies with EU law and, above all, the principle of non-discrimination based on age.
Such discrimination is, however, permitted, if its objective is legitimate and the means to attend this objective are appropriate and necessary and, for the court, based precisely on this case in point. In this case, the objective is effectively legitimate, because in order to calculate the amount of pension, Austrian law does not take into account the overall career until the minimum age required for entering the services of the state (18 years). This effectively means the period of activity remunerated and which involves paying into a pensions scheme. (JK)