Notice for the OJ

 

Action brought on 6 February 2003 by Gunda Schumann against the Commission of the European Communities

    (Case T-49/03)

    (Language of the case: German)

An action against the Commission of the European Communities was brought before the Court of First Instance of the European Communities on 6 February 2003 by Gunda Schumann, resident in Berlin, represented by I. Bock, lawyer, with an address for service in Luxembourg.

The applicant claims that the Court should:

1.annul the decision of 4 June 2002 whereby the selection board in Competition COM/A/11/01 eliminated the applicant at the conclusion of the preliminary tests and did not admit her to the following tests, and also annul the decision of 19 July 2002 whereby the same selection board confirmed its first decision after re-examination; and

2.order the Commission to pay the costs.

Pleas in law and main arguments

The applicant took part in the preliminary tests of Open Competition COM/A/11/01. By the decision of the selection board of 4 June 2002, the applicant was informed that she had not attained the minimum number of points required and could therefore not be admitted to the further tests in the competition. In the annex to the decision, it was explained that one question of the test had been annulled, and that therefore only 39 answers had been taken into consideration in evaluating the tests.

The applicant argues that the two decisions against which her action is brought infringe the principle of proportionality, inasmuch as it was not necessary, in order to ensure equality of treatment between candidates and an objective assessment of the aptitudes of all the participants in the competition, retrospectively to annul a question of the test in all the language versions, whereas all that was needed was to remove irregularities appearing in only one of them. Those decisions were, moreover, disproportionate in that they did not take account of the necessary balance between the general interest and individual interests. It was the annulment of one question and, therefore, the failure to take the effectively "correct" answer into account, which caused the selection board not to admit the applicant to the subsequent stages of the preliminary tests. This is therefore a case of hardship, which the selection board has not treated as such.

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