Order — ECLI:EU:F:2013:161
Date: 2013-10-17
Language of the case: Italian
Court formation: Second Chamber
Based on: Merger Treaty (1965)
Subject matter: Staff regulations and employment conditions - EC
Procedure: Staff cases - inadmissible

Summary Judicial proceedings — Application initiating proceedings — Formal requirements — Application lodged by fax within the time-limit for bringing proceedings — Lawyer’s hand-written signature different from that on the original application received by post — Consequence — Date of receipt of fax not taken into account for assessing whether time-limit for bringing proceedings has been met (Rules of Procedure of the Civil Service Tribunal, Art. 34(1) and (6); Staff Regulations, Art. 91(3)) In European Union civil service proceedings, in order to lodge any pleading properly, the provisions of Article 34 of the Rules of Procedure of the Civil Service Tribunal, and particularly paragraph 1 and paragraph 6 thereof, which allows applications to be submitted by fax, require the representative of the party to sign the original pleading by hand before submitting it by fax and to lodge the same original document with the Tribunal Registry within the next ten days at the latest. That being so, if it is apparent retroactively that the original of the pleading which is physically lodged with the Registry within ten days of its submission by fax does not bear the same signature as that in the faxed document, it must be held that the Tribunal Registry received two separate pleadings, even if the signature was appended by the same person. Since it is not for the Tribunal to check whether both texts are the same word for word, it is clear that, where the signature appended to one of the two documents is not identical to the signature appended to the other, the faxed document is not a copy of the original document that was lodged by post. Moreover, if the submission of the faxed text does not satisfy the requirements of legal certainty laid down by Article 34 of the Rules of Procedure, the date on which the faxed document was lodged cannot be taken into account for the purpose of compliance with the time-limit for bringing proceedings. (see paras 20-21, 23) See: 13 November 2001, T‑138/01 R F v Court of Auditors, paras 8 and 9