In a judgment (Case C-717/24) handed down on Thursday, 21 May, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) found that when calculating the amount of a worker’s pension, Member States must take into account the specific benefits linked to undertaking certain activities in other EU countries.
In Slovakia, a Slovak national has challenged the Slovak authorities’ refusal to take into account all the work he did as an underground miner in a mine in Karviná (located in the former Czechoslovakia and then in the Czech Republic) between July 1976 and August 1995.
According to the Slovak authorities, certain activities carried out in Czech territory cannot be taken into account. Having become independent at the end of 1992, the Czech Republic had abolished the benefits linked to the arduousness of underground mining work, which entitled miners to retire starting at the age of 55 provided that they had worked for 25 years, including 15 years underground. However, by the end of 1992, the plaintiff had not yet reached the required 15 years of work.
The dispute concerns whether, when calculating this 15-year period, there is an obligation to take into account the period between January 1993 and the end of August 1995, during which time the worker had worked as an underground miner in the Czech Republic.
The Slovak Supreme Administrative Court brought the matter before the CJEU, which has interpreted the regulation (883/2004) on the coordination of social security systems, specifically a provision on how periods of activity carried out in different Member States are to be counted when calculating a retirement pension. That rule guarantees that persons who have carried out an activity entitling them to specific benefits do not lose the advantage of those benefits solely because they exercised their freedom of movement in pursuing that activity elsewhere in the EU.
As regards this specific case, the Court of Justice notes that for the period between January 1993 and the end of August 1995, Slovak legislation had retirement rules specific to underground mining work. Since the periods completed by the person concerned in the Czech Republic were in that line of work, it consequently appears — subject to the verifications incumbent upon the Slovak court — that those periods must be taken into consideration when calculating his retirement pension in Slovakia.
See the judgment of the Court of Justice: https://aeur.eu/f/lzw (Original version in French by Mathieu Bion)