2.

The action, which must be regarded as directed against the Commission alone, since the Centre is an integral part of its administrative structure, is therefore mainly concerned with the annulment of the various decisions adopted by the Head of the Applied Mechanics Division of the Centre. Let us consider first of all the decisions of 7 October and 5 November 1982 by which Mr Larsson refused the applicants permission to publish the paper entitled “Constitutive equations of austenitic stainless steels in dynamics — Experiments and calibration procedure”, prepared by the applicants in collaboration with two professors of the University of Bologna. The paper was to have been presented and discussed at the Second Conference on Mechanical Design and Production, held at Cairo University on 27 to 29 December 1982. The documents before the Court disclose the following facts: — On 13 July 1982 the applicants sent the original text and a number of copies of the paper to Professor Eleiche, the Secretary General of the conference, so that he could submit it to the scientific committee thereof. — In a letter dated 30 July 1982 Professor Eleiche informed the applicants that the paper had been accepted by the committee. — On 31 August 1982 the applicants requested permission to publish their paper pursuant to Article 17 of the Staff Regulations. — On 7 October 1982 the Head of Division sent them a memorandum refusing their request. It was stated that the applicants had failed to observe the proper procedure by sending the paper before obtaining permission. Furthermore, the paper was not, from a scientific point of view, ready for publication. — On 19 October 1982 the applicants replied to the Head of Division, explaining the scope of their paper and defending its scientific merits. — On 5 November 1982 the Head of Division sent Mr Montagnani a note confirming the refusal of permission. — In a letter dated 30 November 1982 the applicants asked Professor Eleiche to regard their paper as withdrawn if the requisite permission was not received in time. That request was confirmed at a meeting which they had with Professor Eleiche at Ispra during the summer of 1983. — On 9 March 1983 the applicants requested permission to publish a paper entitled “Dynamic mechanical properties of austenitic stainless steels. Fitting of experimental data on constitutive equations”, once again prepared in collaboration with the two professors of the University of Bologna and intended for a conference to take place in Chicago in August 1983 (SMIRTVII). Permission was granted for this work, which related to subjects similar to those dealt with in the earlier paper. — The paper intended for the Cairo conference appeared with the names and particulars of the four authors in the publication “Current advances in mechanical design and production — Proceedings of the Second Cairo University MDP Conference, 27-29 December 1982”, at p. 475 et seq. The applicants' names and particulars have, however, been deleted from the copy retained in the library at Ispra. Having set out the facts, I shall now turn to the applicants' complaints. Albertini and Montagnani state first of all that when requesting permission to publish they followed the practice in force at the Centre at that time, as set out in Internal Memorandum No 13/79 of 15 May 1979 and in a statement made on 20 January 1983 by three scientific officials working at Ispra. They state that they are not responsible for the publication of the paper since they informed the organizers of the conference in good time that they had not obtained the relevant permission. In support of the claim for annulment the applicants put forward two complaints: lack of powers and misuse of powers. In relation to the first complaint, they rely on Annex I to the decision of the Director General of the Centre dated 20 November 1979 relating to the exercise of the powers conferred by the Staff Regulations on the appointing authority: the power provided for in the second paragraph of Article 17 (grant of permission to publish) is conferred upon the Director of the Ispra establishment and not upon the Head of Division. In any event, they maintain, Article 17 applies to definitive publications and not to papers sent to scientific conferences. As regards misuse of powers, Albertini and Montagnani maintain that the scientific merits of a contribution cannot be assessed at the stage of the request for permission to publish; in any event their paper was certainly not capable of prejudicing the interests of the Community. Naturally, the Commission takes a different view. As far as procedure is concerned, there can, it maintains, be no doubt that, in submitting the request for permission after sending the paper to Professor Eleiche, the applicants infringed the rules in force and also Article 17 of the Staff Regulations, the provision on which they are based. As regards the merits of the decision, it must be pointed out that: (a) other members of the division support the view of Mr Larsson; (b) an inter-divisional seminar on behavioural patterns of materials produced results confirming Mr Larsson's opinion; and (c) two outside experts subsequently consulted gave an adverse opinion on the scientific merits of the paper. The applicants' conduct must in any event be considered in the light of the objective of the second paragraph of Article 17, which is “to guarantee observance of the fundamental requirement... that the publication should be of the standard which the Commission is entitled to expect of its officials and does not prejudice the reputation of the Centre”.