PECULIARITIES OF THE ACTION FOR ANNULMENT OF DECISIONS OF THE BOARDS OF APPEAL OF THE EUROPEAN UNION DECENTRALISED AGENCIES

Abstract

There are ten EU decentralised agencies empowered to take decisions that are intended to produce legal effect vis-à-vis private persons in the context of regulating the internal market. In order to ensure effective protection of the rights of private persons against these agencies, the mechanisms of internal and external legal control of their decisions were established within the EU law. Internal control is achieved through the mechanism of administrative appeals before the Boards of Appeal (BoAs) established within each of the agencies. The BoA’s decision on the appeal is final and legally binding on the parties to the appeal proceedings. It is therefore the subject of an action for annulment before the Court, which ensures external control of the agency decisions. The action for annulment of the BoA’s decision is subject to the same rules that apply to the annulment of any act of EU law intended to produce legal effects vis-à-vis third parties, but there are certain peculiarities in the context of the judicial review of the agency decisions. These peculiarities exist in four aspects of the action for annulment, namely: 1) the jurisdiction of the Court; 2) the grounds for annulment – the scope and intensity of the review performed by the BoA; 3) the effects of the first-instance judgment – alteration of the BoA’s decision in some agencies; and 4) the appeal against the first instance judgment – filtering mechanism under Art. 58a of the Court Statute. These peculiarities are the subject of this paper.