2.

The second point which Mr Alfieri notes is that, according to Article 29 of the Staff Regulations, before holding a competition the appointing authority shall first consider whether the post can be filled by promotion or transfer within the institution. He alleges that there is nothing to show that this was done. To this the Parliament replies that in fact it acted ‘in accordance with the provisions of the Staff Regulations’, and that furthermore Mr Alfieri, who was in the language service, could not hope to obtain an A 3 post by promotion outside his service. This reply necessarily implies that in considering whether the post might be filled by promotion the Parliament excluded a priori servants in the language service, and therefore renders it necessary for you to consider whether this position is in accordance with the Staff Regulations for, if it is not, the decision taken by the appointing authority on this point is perhaps tainted by an error in law vitiating the rest of the procedure. May an official in the language service be appointned by means of transfer or promotion to a post which is not in that service? As you were reminded at the hearing, a member of the European Parliament put a written question on this point to the Commission of the EEC. It replied in the negative, and the position which it has adopted is shared by the institutions as a whole. This seems to correspond with the provisions of the Staff Regulations in spite of some ambiguous points of drafting which doubtless reflect the idea once envisaged of the division of the staff into three services: general, linguistic and technical. As we all know, the present wording of Article 5 of the Staff Regulations classifies the various basic posts according to the nature and the level of duties attaching to them, grading them in four categories in descending order of seniority. Thus there is a vertical division of staff. However it adds to this a two-fold horizontal division. One of these has already been brought into effect: this is the language service designated by the letters L/A grouping together the basic points for translators and interpreters and dividing them into six grades equivalent to Grades 3 to 8 of Category A. These are then grouped in career brackets generally consisting of two grades. The other horizontal division is to be effected in the future. Basic posts relating to the same specialized professional field may be put into services grouping together a certain, number of grades of one or several categories. I should also state for the record that Title VIII of the Staff Regulations lays down special provisions applicable to officials in the ‘scientific or technical services of the Joint Nuclear Research Centre’, the basic posts and corresponding career brackets for whom are set out in a special table. Let us come back to the language service which, the applicant states, is included in Category A so that an L/A official is simply a Grade A official. There is no reason therefore for preventing him from passing by means of promotion to a higher grade outside his service but inside Category A. This argument is not entirely convincing. Whatever Mr Alfieri may say, the language service is indeed ‘a specialized professional field’ which cannot be confused with the other posts of Category A. Otherwise why set up a service? Why endow it with the letters L/A? Why give it grades equivalent to certain grades of Category A? All this seems to me to indicate a desire to give the servants in the language service a livelihood of their own, a career running parallel with the career of other servants in Category A up to a certain point, but without intermingling entirely with them. This is how one can explain the provisions of Articles 7 and 45 of the Staff Regulations, to which both the Commission of the EEC and the Parliament look for support. Article 7 provides that the appointing authority shall assign each official to a post in his category or service which corresponds to his grade. Article 45 (1) adds that promotion for an official means his appointment to the next higher grade in the category or service to which he belongs. Thus when an official belongs to a service, assignment and promotion can only take place inside that service. This compartmentalization may be regrettable particularly since the language service stops at Grade L/A 3, but it seems to follow from the provisions. The result it that, without there being any need to refer to the provisions of Article 45 (2), the linguist can only get a post outside his service by means of a competition. Thus the Parliament was giving precise effect to the Staff Regulations when it did not take L/A 4 members of the language service into account in considering whether the Grade A 3 post might be filled by promotion. The preliminary examination was not tainted by any error of law before the Parliament decided to hold an internal competition.