Let’s get back to the judgment of the Court of Justice’s judgment of 19 March 2015 in Case C-286/13 P Dole Food Company and Dole Fresh Fruit Europe v Commission, EU:C:2015:184 and look at a couple of procedural points that came up. The post on an interesting substantive aspect is here.
The Court of Justice’s recent judgment of 26 March 2015 in Case C-596/13 P Commission v Moravia Gas Storage EU:C:2015:203 sets out – not for the first time – the principle according to which procedural rules in a new directive apply immediately to pending procedures.
Here’s what happened. Continue reading
Here’s a rather amusing case. Well, the way the Court of Justice dealt with the case will make folks who have been left stuck in airports smile. What actually happened to the plaintiffs in the main proceedings was not so funny.
In Case C-394/14 Sandy Siewert and others v Condor Flugdienst, EU:C:2014:2377, the Court of Justice handed down swift and decisive justice. In just under three months, the Court handed down an order responding to a reference from a national court to the effect that the plaintiffs in the national proceedings were indeed entitled to compensation under Regulation 261/2004 because their had been delayed for more than six hours. That’s right: question received by the Court of Justice on 18 August 2014, answer given on 14 November 2014. Bang !
Here’s what happened. Continue reading
The General Court’s judgment in Case T-572/11 Samir Hassan v Council EU:T:2014:682 is interesting in a number of respects but I’ll concentrate on just one issue that it deals with: when can an application be amended to take account of amendments or repeals of the act the annulment of which is sought? Continue reading
Revisions of judgments are not very common. It is possible though, pursuant to Article 44 of the Statute and Article 125 of the Rules of Procedure, to ask the General Court to revise a judgment that has already become final and definitive (res judicata). The conditions that have to be met to obtain revision are strict, as you will see from this order in Case T-82/08 REV Guardian Industries and others v Commission EU:T:2014:693.
The General Court has proposed to the Council, pursuant to Article 254 TFEU, new Rules of Procedure for adoption. You can access the proposal here.
The new rules are a substantial update and seek to modernise and improve the way the ever increasing number of cases is dealt with see our post on statistics for 2013).
The Court of Justice has published new Practice Directions to parties. They are available here.
They take account of the all new Rules of Procedure of September 2012, as amended in June 2013 to add the Croatian language as a language of procedure.
The new Practice Directions are basically some common sense guidelines about how counsel should draft, structure and lodge procedural documents before the Court and conduct cases before it. They state that the application and defence should not exceed 30 pages and should be written intelligibly. Hmmm. If only more lawyers would heed that piece of advice !
All counsel should read them before representing clients before the Court of Justice! If it is possible to sum the up it would be like this: be clear, be concise, use common sense.
EU litigation 