Opinion of the Advocate General — ECLI:EU:C:1999:130
Date: 1999-03-11
Language of the case: French
Based on: Treaty establishing the European Economic Community (1957)
Subject matter: Agriculture and Fisheries;Environment;External relations;Provisions governing the Institutions;Fisheries policy;Pollution
Procedure: Action for annulment - unfounded;Action for annulment - inadmissible

Summary of the Judgment 
1. Actions for annulment — European Parliament's right of action — Conditions — 
Defence of parliamentary prerogatives — Participation in the legislative process — 
Action founding on the inadequacy of the statement of the reasons on which the 
contested measure was based — Inadmissible 
(EC Treaty, Arts 173 (now, after amendment, Art. 230 EC) and 190 (now Art. 253 
EC)) 
2. International agreements — Agreements entered into by the Community — Conclu­
sion of such agreements — Agreements for which the European Parliament's assent is 
required — Agreements with important budgetary implications — Meaning — Criteria 
(EC Treaty, Art. 228(3), second subpara., (now, after amendment, Art. 300(3), second 
subpara., EC)) 
I - 4741 
SUMMARY — CASE C-189/97 
1. The European Parliament may bring an 
action before the Court for annulment 
of an act of the Council or the Com­
mission provided that it does so in 
order to protect its prerogatives. That 
condition is satisfied where the Parlia­
ment indicates in an appropriate man­
ner the substance of the prerogative to 
be safeguarded and how that preroga­
tive is allegedly infringed. 
By virtue of those criteria, an action 
founding on infringement of Arti­
cle 190 of the Treaty (now Article 253 
EC) is inadmissible where the Parlia­
ment, in alleging that the contested 
provisions are inadequately or incor­
rectly reasoned for the purposes of that 
article, fails to provide any relevant 
indication as to how that infringement, 
assuming that it has been committed, is 
such as to impair Parliamentary pre­
rogatives. That is the position where 
the Parliament confines itself to 
arguing that the Council's amendment 
of the legal basis proposed by the 
Commission has affected the Parlia­
ment's ...powers, and fails to indicate 
how the mere fact that the contested 
regulation does not contain any specific 
reasoning in that respect could impair 
the Parliament's prerogatives. 
2. In order to assess whether an agree­
ment between the Community and a 
non-member country has important 
budgetary implications within the 
meaning of the second subparagraph 
of Article 228(3) of the Treaty (now, 
after amendment, Article 300(3), sec­
ond subparagraph, EC) and whether, 
accordingly, its conclusion requires the 
assent of the European Parliament, a 
comparison of the annual financial cost 
of the agreement with the overall 
Community budget scarcely appears 
significant, since appropriations allo­
cated to external operations of the 
Community traditionally account for 
a marginal fraction of the Community 
budget. 
However, comparison of the expendi­
ture under an agreement with the 
amount of the appropriations designed 
to finance the Community's external 
operations offers a more appropriate 
means of assessing the financial impor­
tance which the agreement actually has 
for the Community. Where a sectoral 
agreement is involved, that analysis 
may be complemented by a comparison 
between the expenditure entailed by 
the agreement and the whole of the 
budgetary appropriations for the sector 
in question, taking the internal and 
external aspects together. However, 
since the sectors vary substantially in 
terms of their budgetary importance, 
that examination cannot result in the 
financial implications of an agreement 
being found to be important where 
they do not represent a significant 
share of the appropriations designed 
to finance the Community's external 
operations. 
I - 4742