Judgment — ECLI:EU:T:2007:153
Date: 2007-05-23
Language of the case: Danish
Court formation: Appeals Chamber
Based on: Merger Treaty (1965)
Subject matter: Staff regulations and employment conditions - EC;Procedural provisions
Concepts: Admissibility and examination of applications, forms of order sought and pleas in law
Procedure: Staff cases - inadmissible;Action for damages - inadmissible;Appeal - successful

Summary Procedure – Application initiating proceedings – Formal requirements (Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 21, second para., Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance, Art. 43(1), first para., and Art. 44(6); Instructions to the Registrar of the Court of First Instance, Art. 6(1), (3),(4) and (5)) As the law relating to procedures before the Community courts stands at present, the signature, appended by the lawyer in his own hand, on the original of the application initiating proceedings constitutes the sole means of ensuring that responsibility for the execution and content of that procedural document is assumed by a person entitled to represent the applicant before the Community courts. The requirement of a handwritten signature for the purposes of the first subparagraph of Article 43(1) of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance is thus designed, for reasons of legal certainty, to ensure the authenticity of the application and to eliminate the risk that that document is not in fact the work of the author authorised for that purpose. That requirement must therefore be regarded as an essential procedural rule and be applied strictly, so that failure to comply with it leads to the inadmissibility of the action. Absence of a handwritten signature on the application by a lawyer entitled to sign is not among the formal irregularities that are capable of being cured in accordance with the second paragraph of Article 21 of the Statute of the Court of Justice, Article 44(6) of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance and Article 6(1), (4) and (5) of the Instructions to the Registrar of the Court of First Instance. It follows that the fact of appending, on an application initiating proceedings, a stamp reproducing the signature of the lawyer instructed by the applicant leads to the inadmissibility of the action, since that indirect and mechanical way of ‘signing’ does not by itself support the finding that it is necessarily the lawyer himself who signed the procedural document in question. Such a substantial defect cannot be cured by subsequent explanations by the lawyer leaving no doubt that he himself signed the application, or by confirmation to that effect by the applicant, or by service of the application on the defendant, or by subsequent receipt by the Court of First Instance of a version bearing a handwritten signature. Nor can it be pleaded, in support of regularisation, that the defendant has not shown that there would be an infringement of the rights of the defence if the application were declared admissible, since breach of an essential procedural requirement leads to the inadmissibility of the action, without there being any need to consider the effects of such a breach or, in particular, to establish whether the absence of a handwritten signature on the application resulted in harm to the other party. Nor can the concept of pardonable error be usefully relied on in such a case, even for the purpose, not of making the application vitiated by the absence of a handwritten signature admissible, but of preventing the time-limit for bringing an action from running against the interested party, so as to allow the subsequent submission of a properly signed version of the application, which would not be considered to be out of time. In the absence of any exceptional circumstances which prevented him from signing the application by hand, a lawyer who uses a signature stamp does not display all the diligence required of a normally well‑informed person; consultation of the relevant texts, in particular Article 6(3) of the Instructions to the Registrar, should have led him, as a conscientious and prudent professional, to sign the application by hand. (see paras 48, 50-54, 58-60, 64-66) See: T‑101/92 Stagakis v Parliament [1993] ECR II‑63, para. 8 ; T‑33/89 and T‑74/89 Blackman v Parliament [1993] ECR II‑249, para. 34 ; T‑63/96 Fichtner v Commission [1997] ECR-SC I‑A‑189 and II‑563, para. 25; T‑37/98 FTA and Others v Council [2000] ECR II‑373, paras 25 and 26