Judgment — ECLI:EU:F:2012:157
Date: 2012-11-20
Language of the case: French
Court formation: First Chamber
Based on: Merger Treaty (1965)
Subject matter: Staff regulations and employment conditions - EC
Procedure: Staff cases - unfounded;Staff cases - inadmissible;Action for damages - unfounded

Summary 1. Officials — Acts of the administration — Presumption of validity — Contention — Burden of proof — Obligation to provide evidence to challenge the legality of the act 2. Officials — Competitions — Principle of the impartiality of the selection board — Acquaintanceship between a member of a selection board and a candidate (Staff Regulations, Art. 11a) 1. An administrative act is presumed to be lawful and the burden of proof lies, in principle, with the person claiming it to be unlawful, so that it is for the applicant to provide at the very least sufficiently precise, objective and consistent information to corroborate the truth or likelihood of the facts in support of his claim. Consequently, in the case of a competition, a person concerned who has provided neither evidence nor even a body of indicia must accept that decisions adopted by the selection board are presumed to be lawful, and he cannot expect the Tribunal itself to examine the candidatures of the successful candidates in order to ascertain whether some successful candidates were unlawfully admitted to the competition. (see para. 34) See: 4 February 2010, F‑15/08 Wiame v Commission, para. 21 2. An acquaintanceship between a member of a selection board and a candidate is not in itself sufficient to prove that that member has a personal interest, within the meaning of Article 11a of the Staff Regulations, capable of calling his impartiality into question. The fact that a member of the selection board is personally acquainted with one of the candidates does not necessarily mean that that member will be prejudiced in favour of that candidate’s performance. Furthermore, since an oral test cannot, by its very nature, be anonymous, the fact that one or more candidates work for the same institution as that from which one or two members of the selection board come is not in itself a circumstance that could give the selection board any information that it was not entitled to know. (see para. 38) See: 30 April 2008, F‑16/07 Dragoman v Commission, para. 44