In a judgment handed down on Wednesday 17 December (Joined Cases T-620/23 to T-1023/23 and T-483/24), the General Court of the European Union dismissed the action brought by 405 former MEPs (or their heirs) against the reduction of their additional pension by half.
The plaintiffs - who include a former President of the European Parliament, the Spaniard Enrique Barón Crespo - contested the decisions to reduce their pensions adopted in implementation of the European Parliament’s decision of June 2023 to halve the amount of pensions due under the additional voluntary pension scheme set up in 1990.
The General Court dismissed the actions. In its view, the principle of the protection of acquired rights does not mean that any change in the detailed rules for calculating a pension leading to a reduction in the pension amount constitutes an adverse effect on those acquired rights.
Furthermore, the Court found that Parliament’s practice up to the 2023 decision to amend the scheme by affecting only those beneficiaries not yet receiving their additional pension could not have given rise to a legitimate expectation among those beneficiaries that future reforms of the scheme would not affect those already receiving it.
The Court notes that the 2023 decision aims to safeguard the pension fund managed by the European Parliament in the short term and to limit the consequences of its deficit on European taxpayers. Since this is an optional additional pension, this decision does not reduce the nominal pension amounts to a level that would be unreasonable, emphasises the European judge.
To see the General Court’s judgment: https://aeur.eu/f/k2a (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)