1.

With regard to the first point which has to be considered the applicant does not — if I have correctly understood him — object to the fact that recommendations of Directors-General play any part in the procedure for promoting officials. In fact it also has to be acknowledged that it is eminently reasonable to adopt this practice within an organization as large as the Commission. In this institution the competent appointing authority — which for the promotion of officials in Grade A 5 is, as I have already mentioned, the Commission itself — does not have the requisite information concerning all officials, who come into consideration for promotion. On the other hand Directors-General are familiar with the situation in the Directorate which they run in particular because of their close collaboration with their subordinate heads of department. This means that the recommendations for promotion of the Directors-General not only constitute valuable information over and above the equally important reports made under Article 43 of the Staff Regulations which certainly do not elucidate all the important factors; the recommendations for promotion operate as it were as a useful counterweight to these reports, which in the nature of things are not drawn up in exactly the same way and with reference to exactly the same criteria. The applicant's criticism is directed rather to the absence of any objective criteria for making recommendations for promotion and the points for assessment to be obtained from this source. Moreover the applicant takes the view that the making of recommendations for promotion is not preceded by an adequate consideration of the comparative merits of the candidates for promotion. I do not consider this criticism to be well founded. Directors-General are obliged to establish an order of priority for the purposes of their recommendations for promotion. Further it is clear from the hearing of the witnesses that Directors-General when making their recommendations rely on the reports made under Article 43 of the Staff Regulations, that in addition they take into account the recommendations of their heads of department or other persons who are in a position to give a material judgment and that as far as possible they endeavour to make their own assessment. It is in my opinion also important to note that before recommendations for promotion are made in the Directorates-General there are discussions with the various heads of department which help to clarify the value to be placed on the recommendations for promotion made by the individual heads of department. I therefore heve no reason to doubt that a consideration of the comparative merits of the officals eligible for promotion within the meaning of Article 45 of the Staff Regulations precedes the making of the recommendations. That the applicant was also included in this assessment follows moreover from the fact that his name is also on the list of proposals for promotion of Directorate-General V: even if it was not very high on the list. On the other hand, so far as the lack of any objective criteria for making recommendations for promotion by Directors-General and also for the acceptance of additional factors for assessment are concerned, there is in my view no such deficiency because the criteria which call for consideration in this connexion cannot be exhaustively enumerated and also can hardly be quantified. In particular it must not be forgotten — I refer on this point to the Opinion in Joined Cases 25 and 30/64, Fulvio Fonzi v Commission of the European Atomic Energy Community ([1965] ECR 512) —that ‘promotion is … justified … also by other subjective facts that are considered concerning the character and the personality of officials’, that is to say, by factors for which it is clearly impossible to lay down objective criteria for their evaluation. In addition to this it must be said — and this seems to me to be particularly significant — the fact that the procedure for promoting officials is organized in such a way that recommendations for promotion do not only represent the subjective assessment of the Directors-General. Thus we have heard that recommendations are made after discussions between the Directors-General and their heads of department. Furthermore it is a matter of crucial importance that the recommendations are published before the first meeting of the Promotion Committee so that the officials concerned have the opportunity to make representations to the Committee. Moreover the Promotion Committee has a general right to ask for additional information and to effect changes in the recommendations. It is in precisely this way, i.e. with the help of the right of the Promotion Committee, on which, as I have already mentioned, staff representatives sit, to check the recommendations, that provision is undoubtedly made for an appropriate coordination of the recommendations for promotion. To sum up the conclusion must be that the arguments submitted in connexion with the first head of the applicant's conclusions to the extent to which they relate to the actual system adopted for making recommendations for promotion, are not valid.