Judgment — ECLI:EU:T:1999:256
Date: 1999-10-14
Language of the case: Italian
Court formation: Second Chamber
Based on: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (1957)
Subject matter: Food aid;Development cooperation;External relations
Concepts: General;Applications by natural or legal persons;Food aid;Limitation periods
Procedure: Action for annulment - successful;Action for annulment - inadmissible
Origin: Italy

Summary of the O r d e r 
Procedure — Intervention — Interested parties — Assessment by the Community judicature of 
the interest to intervene 
(EC Statute of the Court of Justice, Art. 37, second para.; Rules of Procedure of the Court of First 
Instance, Art. 115) 
The interest of a party seeking leave to inter­
vene, within the meaning of the second para­
graph of Article 37 of the Statute of the 
Court of Justice, falls to be defined in the 
light of the actual subject-matter of the 
dispute in question. For the purposes of 
granting leave to intervene, the Community 
judicature must ascertain, in the case of an 
action for annulment, whether the applicant 
for such leave is directly affected by the con­
tested decision and whether his interest in 
the result of the case is established. Similarly, 
the prospective intervener must establish a 
direct, existing interest in the grant of the 
II - 573 
SUMMARY — CASE T-191/96 
order as sought and not an interest in rela­
tion to the pleas in law put forward. The 
interest necessary in this respect must not 
relate merely to abstract legal arguments but 
to the actual form of order sought by a party 
to the main action. 
More specifically, it is necessary to distin­
guish between prospective interveners estab­
lishing a direct interest in the ruling on the 
specific act whose annulment is sought and 
those who can establish only an indirect 
interest in the result of the case by means of 
similarities between their situation and that 
of one of the parties. In that respect, the 
mere fact that an economic operator finds 
himself in a situation analogous to that of the 
applicant, in particular in that it claims to 
have suffered damage as a result of the same 
Community act, and that the case in which 
he seeks leave to intervene could give rise to 
a judgment whose grounds might influence 
the manner in which the defendant institu­
tion would deal with his own situation is 
not, in itself, sufficient to establish an interest 
to intervene for the purposes of the afore­
mentioned provision. 
II - 574