Brussels, 24/09/2015 (Agence Europe) - The obligation for people taking recruitment competitions to become European officials or agents to choose English, French or German as a second language is not objectively justified.
This was the European General Court's view, expressed in a ruling issued on Thursday 24 September in two joined cases in which Italy (T-124/13) and Spain (T-191/13) called for the cancellation of several competition notices issued by the European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO). The European Commission was unable to justify to the court the requirement that ensuring candidates speak one of the three languages in question which the Commission feels is crucial to ensure the proper functioning of EU institutions.
The General Court says the relations between the Institutions and their officials and agents fall within the scope of Regulation No. 1 of 1958 on the European Economic Community's langauge system and therefore cannot be covered by an internal regulation.
The judges therefore didn't even need to examine the selection procedure or the competition in order to cancel the contested notices because they said that the EU was violated when candidates contacted EPSO. Correspondence between the two parties can only be carried out in English, French or German. The General Court ruled that candidate must have the right to choose the language in which to draft the application form from any of the official languages and that correspondence from EPSO must also be written in the language chosen by candidates.
The obligation to choose one of the three languages for competition is clearly discriminatory, explains the General Court, which then examined the Commission's arguments justifying this practice, but described as “vague” the statement that the three languages in question are those which are the most widely used in the European institutions. “It cannot be presumed that a newly recruited official who does not master one of the working languages or languages of deliberation in an Institution is incapable of immediately carrying out useful work in the institution concerned,” explained the Court.
The European Commission's reaction to publication of the ruling was rather laconic. A spokesperson said: “We are assessing very carefully what the practical implications are,” and that the court's ruling didn't affect the competition in question. (Original version in French by Jan Kordys)