Keywords

Summary



Keywords

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1. Officials ° Representation ° Constraints associated with performance of duties as staff representative ° Taking into account when staff report drawn up ° Duties of assessors

(Staff Regulations, Arts 24a and 43; Annex II, Art. 1, sixth para.)

2. Officials ° Reports procedure ° Staff Report ° Review by the Court ° Limits ° Duties of assessors ° Statement of reasons for less favourable report compared with previous report ° Need for consistency between analytical assessments and comments

(Staff Regulations, Art. 43)

Summary

1. In pursuance of the Staff Regulations, staff representatives must be provided by their institution with the facilities which prove necessary for the exercise of their representative duties. Furthermore, freedom of union activity, recognized in Article 24a of the Staff Regulations, means in particular that trade union representatives must themselves be granted time off work in order to participate in consultation with the institutions.

It follows, in particular, that the activities associated with staff representation must be taken into consideration when the staff reports of the officials concerned are drawn up, in such a way that they are not penalized for carrying out such activities. Consequently, even though the assessor and appeal assessor are authorized solely to assess the performance in the post to which he is assigned of an official who has a mandate as staff representative, to the exclusion of the activities connected with that mandate, which are not within their competence, they must none the less take account of the constraints connected with the exercise of those duties as staff representative.

They must, more specifically, take account of the fact that by reason of his activities as a representative, an official on whom a report is made has only been able to provide in his department fewer days than the normal number of working days in the period covered by the report. The proficiency and work of that official must therefore be assessed, for the purposes of the staff report, on the basis of the performance which the institution is normally entitled to expect from an official of the same grade during a period corresponding to the time he has actually devoted to his activity in the department to which he is posted after deducting the time spent, under the conditions laid down in the Staff Regulations, in his activity as staff representative.

2. Assessors have wide discretion when judging the work of persons upon whom they must report and it is not for the Court to interfere with their assessments save in the case of error or manifest exaggeration. In view of such discretion, respect for the rights guaranteed by the Community legal order is of fundamental importance. Those guarantees include, in particular, the duty of the competent institution to examine carefully and impartially all the relevant aspects of the individual case, the right of the person concerned to make his views known and to have an adequately reasoned decision. Only in this way can the Community judicature verify whether the factual and legal elements upon which the exercise of the power of appraisal depends were present.

In a staff report the purpose of the optional comments accompanying the assessments in the analytical grid is to justify those assessments, in order to enable the official reported on to determine whether they are well founded and, where appropriate, to enable the Court to effect its review. For that purpose it is important for assessments which are less favourable than those in the previous report to be justified by the assessors and for the assessments and the comments intended to justify them to be consistent one with another.