2.

This still leaves us to decide how to answer the question which is put to you. As far as the Belgian Cour de Cassation is concerned, the formula ‘acts performed by them [officials] in their official capacity’ is capable of the following two interpretations: according to the wider interpretation it refers to acts performed by officials in the exercise of their duties and having some relationship with their vocational activities. According to a narrower interpretation, it would only cover acts constituting the actual performance of their normal duties or those prescribed by the Staff Regulations. You are not required to give a judgment on the substance of the matter before the Belgian court; it is however impossible to overlook the fact that the circumstances of the case have guided the way in which the question is put to you and that the observations submitted either in writing or orally have frequently referred to it. According to a the wider interpretation, it will suffice to bring immunity into play if the offence in question occurred when the official was making his way to the place of his mission driving his private car, for the facts are clearly not unrelated to his work and this is so whatever may be the terms of his travel order and whatever too may be the conclusions to be drawn in pursuance of the Staff Regulations from the use by an official of his own vehicle. According to the stricter interpretation on the contrary, stress will be laid on the fact that the person responsible for the accident was an engineer whose qualifications are not precisely known but were certainly in any case not those of a chauffeur and the conclusion will therefore be drawn that his act is not covered by the immunity. The arguments in favour of one or other of these conceptions have been laid before us in excellent terms during the oral proceedings by Mr Sayag's and Mr Leduc's eminent advocates; so I shall not return to them. On the other hand I should like to consider the view put forward from the beginning by the Commission and sustained with even greater vigour during the oral procedure because this concept shows up the narrow relationship which exists between Article 11 and Article 17 and because there in my view the nub of the problem is to be found. The existence of the Communities does not in itself affect the principle of sovereignty of the state, which continues to apply in its proper sphere, on its territory, as against all persons: the normal course of justice, just like police regulations, must be respected. Nor can the recognition of immunity affect such sovereignty unless it is necessary to permit the institutions, acting through the agency of its servants, to accomplish its task without obstacles created by the rules or intervention of the national authorities: in other words, the purpose of the immunity is to settle the conflict which may arise between the accomplishment of that Community task and national law. The Commission has quoted to you examples of this possible conflict, referring to cases which have already risen: that of the consultant physician who must be in a position to practise in a state of which he is not a national without exposing himself to prosecution for illegal practice of medicine. There is the case — of which echoes have recently been heard in the press — of officials who must be able to maintain contacts on behalf of the Community with officials of the eastern world or to travel to those countries without being subsequently the object of indiscreet curiosity on the part of the police. Other cases may be imagined: when, for example, at the time of the Suez crisis and in order to save petrol the country in which you have your seat forbade car driving on Sundays, this prohibition could not in any event apply to cars being used for the purposes of the ECSC. The stress must therefore be placed upon the Community. So that there may be grounds for immunity, one must be faced with an act, an oral or written statement which must in reality be the act of an institution itself, one which involves it officially. It is the Community which is being protected and the immunity does not benefit its servants except as it were indirectly to the extent to which the Community expresses itself through them and to which they perform Community acts and set in motion the powers of the institution. In these circumstances it will be understood that immunity may be limited to cases in which the official is carrying out specific duties on behalf of the Community. This clearly links up with the idea expressed by Professor Mario Miele in his work on the privileges and immunities of international civil servants (p. 40) when he says that, in order to be covered by the immunity, the act must ‘arise out of the sphere’ of the duties with which the official is charged. Above all, he adds, it is necessary to inquire whether there is a connexion or an essential link of causality between the act and the duty with which the official is charged. The role of Euratom and its officials is to adopt regulations or take decisions, to conclude contracts, to carry out work in research centres. From this point of view one might even wonder whether driving a Community vehicle by one of the institution's drivers has a link with the progress of the Community sufficient to give rise to immunity. In any event, as far as the use of a private car by an official is concerned, the answer appears to me to be necessarily in the negative, because the driving of a vehicle does not come within the official tasks and duties of the servant and is the result of a free choice on his part. I shall not dwell on this point: a comparison between Annex VII of the Staff Regulations and the travel order shows that thd use of a vehicle is authorized but not compulsory and takes place on the responsibility of the official. Hence an offence arising out of such use does not require any waiver of immunity on the part of the institution before it can be penalized; it is not covered by the immunity.