Luxembourg, 14/02/2001 (Agence Europe) - The Court of First Instance (CFI) has ruled the appeal by thirteen Portuguese breeders of fighting bulls as inadmissible. They were disputing the decision of the European Commission which, until June 2000, prohibited them from exporting their animals to Spain and France (see EUROPE of 7 February, p.15).
The Commission's decision was addressed in "abstract and general terms at categories of undefined people", that is to say all breeders, said the fourth chamber of the CFI over which the Finnish judge Virpi Tili presided. There was nothing to distinguish these thirteen breeders from other Portuguese breeders who could not export their animals either, the Court stipulates. They were not "individually" concerned as the Treaty demands for a "citizen" to be able to turn to European justice, it concludes.
This case raises the issue of the access for an individual to European justice, rendered "almost impossible" according to lawyers, by the conditions demanded in the Treaty, which are: to be directly and, especially, individually concerned.
In its note for the Intergovernmental Conference of 2000, the EU's Council of the Bars and Law Societies, that brings together all European lawyers, recommended a review of the Treaty so that a citizen had genuine access to European justice, but the provision concerning access to justice for individuals remains unchanged.
The lawyers consider the individuals have very little protection against laws laid down by Community institutions even when they cause them serious and irreparable injury. For them, protection of "citizens" is lesser than what the latter benefit from in Member States.
In his last intervention as lawyer, Nicholas Forwood, current British judge at the CFI, set out the difficulties facing individuals. In practice, they have very little chance of being able to successfully dispute a law laid down by a European institution, he said. Nicholas Forwood took as example the now famous case of people living close to two power plants under construction and financed through the European Regional Development Fund, in Teneriffe, in Spain. A fisherman, an ornithologist, a farmer, a surfer, a head teacher, among others, concerned at the environmental and health consequences of these power plants, had called on the CFI to annul the Commission's decision of funding the construction. According to them, the absence of a prior environmental impact study, provided for by a European directive, made this decision illegal. The Court declared their case to be inadmissible: their interests were no different from those of any other resident, fisherman, farmer or tourist living in the Grand Canaries. Consequently, they were not individually concerned. Having had the case referred to it in turn, the Court of Justice confirmed the inadmissibility of the case.
EUROPE recalls that at the time of the French nuclear tests in the Pacific, three residents in Tahiti, Marie-Therese Danielsson, Pierre Largenteau and Edwin Haoa had likewise been rebuffed as they were not "individually concerned" by these tests. The former President of the Court of First Instance, Antonio Saggio, had explained to them that even supposing they could "suffer personal injury linked to the claimed harmful effects of nuclear tests (…) for the environment and to the health of the population, this circumstance did not in itself suffice to individualize them" and distinguish them from other Polynesians resident "in the area under consideration" subjected to the same risk of irradiation. The Tahitians wanted to dispute the lack of intervention on the part of the European Commission to ban these tests (see EUROPE of 5 January 1995).