Notice for the OJ

 

Action brought on 7 December 2001 by Julia Abad Pérez and Others against the Council of the European Union and the Commission of the European Communities

    (Case T-304/01)

    Language of the case: Spanish

An action against the Council of the European Union and the Commission of the European Communities was brought before the Court of First Instance of the European Communities on 7 December 2001 by Julia Abad Pérez and Others, all of them established in Spain, represented by Miquel Roca Junyent, Joan Roca Sagarra and Marta Pons de Vall Alomar, lawyers.

The applicants claim that the Court should:

(declare that the Council and the Commission have acted unlawfully and are thus liable under Article 288 EC for having spread the BSE crisis within the territory of the European Union and, consequently, for the damage alleged in the present application;

(order the Council and the Commission jointly and severally to pay compensation for the damage caused to the applicants as a result of that crisis, quantified in the present application in the sum of 19 438 372.69 euros, and for the non-material damage suffered by them (amounting to a further 15% over and above the aforementioned sum, that is to say, 2 915 755.80 euros); and

(order the Council and the Commission to pay the costs.

Pleas in law and main arguments:

The applicants are Spanish stockbreeders. They are claiming compensation for the damage and prejudice suffered as a result of the crisis concerning the so-called "mad cow disease" since the outbreak of the first case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) in Spain on 22 November 2000, which plunged the Spanish stockbreeding sector into a serious crisis from which it has still not yet managed fully to recover.

According to the applicants, each stockbreeder is currently having to bear:

(the costs of removal and destruction of specified risk material (SRM);

(in most cases, the extermination of the entire herd where a cow is found to be infected;

(a decrease in consumption of beef and a lack of consumer confidence resulting from the unpopularity of veal in the market, with the consequent direct economic cost arising from the repercussions of reports in the media of the discovery of each new case of mad cow disease or of persons afflicted by Creutzfeld-Jakob disease in any Member State of the European Union; and

(the removal of the spinal column in calves aged over 12 months.

The applicants maintain that the abovementioned damage, to which must be added the collateral and non-material damage with which they have also been faced, results primarily from a lack of action, alternatively tardy and inadequate action, on the part of the Council and the Commission, which allowed BSE to develop into the most serious agricultural and food crisis to affect the Union since its creation. The absence of a resolute policy to control that disease with a view to its total eradication, which allowed it to spread from the United Kingdom throughout Europe, constitutes an unlawful act on the part of the Community institutions in question, since those institutions had the requisite powers, from the appearance of the very first signs of the crisis, to adopt all the legal measures needed to resolve it.

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