Judgment — ECLI:EU:T:1998:59
Date: 1998-03-19
Language of the case: Dutch
Court formation: Fourth Chamber
Based on: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (1957)
Subject matter: Competition;Provisions governing the Institutions;Access to documents
Concepts: Statement of reasons;Obligation to state reasons;Administrative procedure;Protection of court proceedings and legal advice
Procedure: Action for annulment - unfounded
Origin: Netherlands

SUMMARY — CASE T-83/96 
1. Decision 94/90 on public access to Com­
mission documents provides, as an excep­
tion to the general principle of the right 
of access to documents, that the institu­
tions are to refuse access to any docu­
ment where disclosure could undermine, 
inter alia, 'the protection of the public 
interest (... court proceedings ...)'. That 
exception is intended to ensure general 
respect for the fundamental right of every 
person to a fair hearing by an indepen­
dent tribunal which means that both 
national and Community courts must be 
free to apply their own rules of procedure 
concerning the powers of the judge, the 
conduct of the proceedings in general and 
the confidentiality of the documents on 
the file in particular. The scope of that 
exception is therefore not restricted solely 
to the protection of the interests of the 
parties in the context of specific court 
proceedings, but encompasses the proce­
dural autonomy of the aforementioned 
courts, so that it entitles the Commission 
to rely on that exception even when it is 
not itself party to the court proceedings 
which justify the protection of the public 
interest. 
Application of that exception can be jus­
tified only in respect of documents 
drafted by the Commission for the sole 
purposes of a particular court case, to the 
exclusion of other documents which exist 
independently of such proceedings, since 
the decision whether or not to grant 
access to the first category of documents 
is a matter for the appropriate national 
court alone, in accordance with the essen­
tial rationale of the aforementioned 
exception. 
As regards documents sent by the Com­
mission to a national court in response to 
a request for information from the latter 
in the context of cooperation based on 
Notice 93/C 39/05 on the application of 
Articles 85 and 86 of the Treaty, the pro­
tection of the public interest requires the 
Commission to refuse access to that 
information, and therefore to the docu­
ments containing it, because the decision 
concerning access to such information is a 
matter to be decided exclusively by the 
appropriate national court on the basis of 
its own national procedural law for as 
long as the court proceedings giving rise 
to its incorporation in a Commission 
document are pending. 
2. The duty to give reasons for a decision 
laid down in Article 190 of the Treaty has 
a two-fold purpose, namely, on the one 
hand, to permit interested parties to 
know the justification for the measure so 
as to enable them to protect their rights 
and, on the other, to enable the Commu­
nity judicature to exercise its power to 
review the legality of the decision. The 
question as to whether a statement of rea­
sons satisfies those requirements must be 
assessed with reference not only to its 
wording but also to its context and the 
II - 546 
VAN DER WAL ν COMMISSION 
whole body of legal rules governing the 
matter in question. 
When the institution rejects an applica­
tion for access to documents, and states 
the reasons, and the party concerned 
submits a confirmatory application seek­
ing to have that rejection reconsidered, 
and the institution's reply confirms the 
rejection on the same grounds, it is 
appropriate to consider the sufficiency of 
the reasons given in the light of all the 
exchanges between the institution and the 
applicant, taking into account also the 
information already available to the appli­
cant. 
II - 547