Luxemburg, 16/01/2006 (Agence Europe) - The French Front National and its MEPs Bruno Gollnisch, Carl Lang and Jean-Claude Martinez along with Philip Claeys, Koen Dillen (Vlaams Belang), Mario Borghezio (Lega Nord) and Marie-France Stirbois (former Front National MEP) have asked the European Court of Justice to annul the Court of First Instance order which, on 11 July 2005, declared their proceedings for annulment of the European Parliament Regulation of 4 November 2003 on the Statute and financing of European political parties inadmissible.
The European Court order whose annulment the Front National is seeking, has not been made public, and thus is one of a group of orders the outcome of which is merely mentioned in the Official Journal. This policy of non-transparency is frequently criticised by lawyers who believe that all orders should be published since they determine admissibility criteria for political parties' and MEPs' complaints against European Parliament regulations that concern them.
The Front National maintains that it meets the admissibility criteria to be able to challenge the Parliamentary regulation, being both directly and individually concerned by the text, given also that the Court has to take account of its “strong representativeness”. The above MEPs consider that they can be distinguished from any other citizen and that they thus meet the criteria for challenging the regulation.
In its 11 July 2005 order, the Court's second chamber accepted that the Front National was “directly concerned” by the Parliamentary regulation, but determined that it was not individually concerned: for that, the Front National would have had to prove that the Community legislature's intention was to exclude all political parties which did not share a so-called federalist vision of the European Union, by, for example, supporting the death penalty or being openly euro-sceptical.
At any rate, continued the Court, even if the legislature knew that the criteria determining the statute of European political parties would exclude some political groupings, these criteria were formulated in such an abstract and general way that they could be said to be targeting an indeterminate number of political groupings.
The Court nonetheless did not exclude the hypothesis that it could control the judicial review of this same regulation whenever Parliament granted or refused funding requested by a political party.
As for the individual MEPs, the Court explained that they were not directly concerned by the regulation on financing political parties: this regulation does not affect either the rights linked to their mandate or MEPs' remuneration, or the relationship between the MEP and the political party of which he/she is a member.
Article 3 of the Parliamentary regulation sets out a series of conditions (representativeness in at least a quarter of Member States, respect for democratic principles) to be met in order to be able to claim the statute of “European political party” and funding from the European Union's general budget.