2.

For a summary of the facts it seems to me useful to retrace the various stages of the “affaire Hebrant”. The applicant, an Italian who is a qualified librarian, was engaged by the Parliament on 1 December 1967 as an administrator in Grade A 5. From that date she undertook duties relating to the management and administration of the library. On 1 January 1973 she was promoted to Grade A 4. The reorganization of the General Secretariat of the Parliament on the accession of the United Kingdom, Denmark and Ireland was particularly extensive in the Directorate-General of Parliamentary Documentation and Information. It was divided into two directorates-general: Information and Public Relations on the one hand and Research and Documentation on the other. In 1972 Mr Taylor, a British national, was appointed head of the latter directorate and from 1 March 1974 he also took over direct responsibility for the library. Meanwhile in 1973 the library itself was divided into two sections, the first being the Cataloguing and Administration Division, later changed to Cataloguing and Library Administration and directed by the applicant, and the second being References and Official Documents, later renamed Reference, Information and Documentation. In planning the reorganization of the library, Director-General Taylor proposed to substitute the decimal system of classification for the analytical system which had been in use up to that point. Finally he chose a mixed system, retaining the analytical classification for the existing collections and applying the decimal system to new acquisitions and works of special interest. From the outset the applicant declared her opposition to such a change and she remained opposed to it even after the Office of the President of the Parliament had, on 23 September 1974, authorized Mr Taylor to proceed with the reorganization. On 7 November 1974 an ad hoc working party was formed under the chairmanship of Mr Reid, likewise a British national, who had been engaged by the Parliament on 25 February 1974 as a temporary servant in Grade A 5. The first time the applicant came before this Court was to challenge that appointment. In a judgment of the Second Chamber of 20 May 1976 (Case 66/75, [1976] ECR 593) the application was dismissed. The Court observed that in appointing Mr Reid the Parliament had exercised its powers of internal organization and that the applicant's responsibilities were not therefore downgraded in such a way as to abnegate the relationship between the duties assigned to her on the one hand, and her grade and post on the other. Within the Directorate-General, however, tension merely increased. The applicant came to this Court a second time to challenge the periodic report on herself for the period 1973 to 1974 which, in her opinion, contained inadequate assessments. However, in a judgment of 12 May 1977 (Case 31/76, [1977] ECR 883), the First Chamber of the Court rejected the application on the ground that the arguments put forward by the applicant were unfounded. As we shall see more clearly in due course, the applicant's third action is closely bound up with the subject-matter of the present dispute. Both in fact concern the respective careers of the applicant and of Mr Reid. In various preparatory documents relating to the budget and the organization of the Parliament the Secretary-General and the Committee on Budgets had, during the years 1978 and 1979, referred to the conversion of posts in Grade A 5/4 to Grade A 3 posts for the heads of the Cataloguing and Library Administration Division and the Reference, Information and Documentation Division. In a - memorandum of 5 September 1979 regarding the adoption of the 1980 budget Mr Taylor, in accordance with the budgetary restraints fixed by a resolution of the Parliament of 10 May 1979, proposed that only the post of Head of the Reference, Information and Documentation Division should be converted to Grade A 3 for the budgetary year 1980. The proposal was approved by the Secretary-General and by the Committee on Budgets. Consequently, on 14 July 1980 Vacancy Notice No 2677 was published advertising a vacant post of head of division: the post of Head of the Reference, Information and Documentation Division had in fact been upgraded in the list of posts for 1980. The applicant applied to this Court for the third time in opposition to the presumed nomination of Mr Reid for promotion to Grade A 3. By an Order of 18 November 1980 (Case 141/80, [1980] ECR 3509), the Third Chamber declared the application inadmissible inasmuch as it was directed against a measure which did not adversely affect the applicant (namely, proposals and decisions of the competent authorities of an institution relating to the drawing up of the budget). So we come to the current dispute. Five applications were submitted for the post advertised in Vacancy Notice No 2677. After examining them the appointing authority appointed Mr Reid to Grade A3 as head of the Reference, Information and Documentation Division of the Parliament by a decision of 24 October 1980 which was published on 25 November. Having received no reply to her administrative complaint, the applicant brought the present action pursuant to Article 90 (2) of the Staff Regulations.