The Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) handed down, on Thursday 14 July, two judgments in which it rejected the appeals of Italy and the Comune di Milano, on the one hand, and the European Parliament, on the other, which challenged respectively the decision of the representatives of the governments of the EU Member States to locate the seat of the European Medicines Agency (EMA) in Amsterdam and the one of the European Labour Authority (ELA) in Bratislava.
In these judgments, the Court considers that these decisions cannot be qualified as acts of the EU Council and constitute “acts taken collectively and by common accord(...) in a field in which the Treaties do not provide for action” by government representatives. Therefore, these decisions are deprived of any binding legal effect in Union law and cannot be subject to an action for annulment.
Moreover, the Court points out, the competence to decide on the location of the seat of an entity such as the EMA or the ELA lies with the Union legislator and not with the Member States.
The seat of the EMA was established by Regulation 2018/1718, after the representatives of the governments of the Member States decided on 20 November 2017 to choose Amsterdam as the seat of the EMA, replacing London. The decision to locate the ELA in Brastislava was made in 2019.
Moreover, the Court concluded, “it would have been open to the Parliament, in the event of disagreement with the political decision of the Member States, to oppose the reflection of that decision in a legislative act of the Union”. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)