1.

In the applicant's view Article 7 (1) of the Staff Regulations was infringed in two respects by the decision to alter his employment. First, the Commission did not observe the procedure provided for in the case of transfer. Secondly, the contested decision was not taken solely in the interests of the service. As regards the first point,of view I need only repeat that the contested decision was not a transfer within the meaning of the Staff Regulations so that there was no reason to observe the formalities provided for such a case. It is obvious however that it is the disregard of the interests of the service which is the most significant in the eyes of the applicant. (a) Before I examine the applicant's arguments I think it necessary to clarify the nature of the review which the Court may exercise over decisions on transfers or on alteration of employment. On the one hand it is clear from the well-established case-law of the Court (judgment of 11 July 1968 in Case 16/67 Labeyrie v Commission [1968] ECR 293; judgment of 16 June 1971 in Case 61/70 Vistosi v Commission [1971] ECR 535; judgment of 14 July 1977 in Case 61/76 Geist v Commission [1977] ECR 1419, judgment of 24 February 1981 in Joined Cases 161 and 162/80 Carbognani and Coda Zabetta v Commission) that “the Community institutions are at liberty to organize their offices to suit the tasks entrusted to them and to assign the staff available to them in the light of such tasks”. For that reason, as I stated in my opinion in the Geist case “the appointing authority has wide discretion in respect of the issue of measures of that nature which are closely connected with the exercise of the power of the administration. Accordingly, the Court of Justice cannot in such a case enter into all questions of detail, particularly those which involve considerations of expediency” ([1977] ECR at p. 1442). On the other hand it is not sufficient for the administration to invoke in the abstract the interests of the service for an alteration in the employment of its officials to be ipso facto lawful. The concept of the interests of the service is an imprecise and vague one. Its mere mention, which can take on the character of a commonplace and correspond to nothing precise, is not sufficient for even a limited judicial review to be possible. I consider it necessary for the administration to be in a position to state the specific nature of such interest, which should be significantly less important than the adversely affected interests of the officials concerned. I shall now, in the light of those principles, consider the applicant's arguments which are intended to show that the decision taken in regard to him seem contrary to the well-understood interests of the service and that, contrary to the contentions of the Commission, it in no way corresponded to his own interest. (b) I shall begin with the general distinction drawn by the applicant according to whether or not there is an alteration in employment following a reorganization or posts such as that which took place within the Translation Department in 1973. The applicant concedes that the transfer of a post together with its holder may be justified as being in the interests of the service in the context of a reorganization. Since however the decision affecting him was taken without any connexion, even partial, with a reorganization, it cannot be justified by showing that on the basis of the work which had led to the reorganization his employment was more useful in his new division than in his original division. Those considerations, in my view, are based on a false premise. The distinction drawn by the applicant seems to me to conflict both with the very general wording of the judgments which admit the Community institutions' right to determine and alter their posts and to employ the staff at their disposal accordingly and with the facts underlying at least some of those judgments (in particular the judgments in Labeyrie and Vistosi). (c) The other arguments put forward are of lesser importance. Thus Mr Kindermann mentions the adverse effects of his transfer on the work of the Translation Section of the Administrative Commission which he considers confirmed by the letter from Mr Schneider to Mr Ciancio dated 29 August 1979. In that letter the Secretary-General of the Administrative Commission pointed out to the Director for Translations his misgivings regarding the effects on the work of the Administrative Commission and the ancillary bodies working in connexion with it which would be caused by the transfer of four revisers and translators who had for a long time been at its disposal. He closed with the request that Mr Ciancio should cancel his decision or postpone implementation of the decisions taken until the necessary replacement staff could be found and settled in to its new tasks. It is true that at the end of August 1979 Mr Schneider showed some concern but his observations cannot be given the significance which the applicant attributes to them. First it is self-evident that every change in the composition of an administrative department may cause transitional difficulties in the progress of its work. Secondly a comparison of the documents in the van Scbaik case with those in the present case affords grounds for thinking that the greatest difficulties within the Translation Section of the Administrative Commission arose not in the Dutch but in the German section. Of four Dutch translators there was a change of employment only in respect of Mr Kindermann and he could have been replaced in a satisfactory manner. It is therefore probable, as the Commission's representative explained at the hearing, that Mr Schneider's letter basically related to the German part of the Translation Section of the Administrative Commission, which, as I have understood, was to lose two experienced members out of four, although it was already overloaded with work, a fact which had led to considerable arrears in the translations required of it. (d) The applicant adds that to his knowledge the Dutch Translation Division did not need to be strengthened when he was assigned to it. He had therefore been taken from a post where he was needed to be placed in a post in which there was scarcely any work for him. He finds evidence of this in the fact that at first he was made directly responsible to the Head of the Dutch Division who gave him translation work from various fields. In considering that submission regard must be had, in my view, to the wide discretion of the Commission in organizing its departments. Since the administration has the right to change the employment of its translators and can, justify such changes as being in the interests of the service, it is natural for it to return those translators who were previously at the disposal of other administrative units to the Translation Division corresponding to their language which represents the natural area of their employment. In the same way it is obvious that the person in charge of the division will obtain an impression of the special capacities of each translator by entrusting him with various kinds of translations before assigning him to a specialist group in his division. The applicant has moreover never alleged that he was given no work. (e) I think I have thus shown that the contested decision was not against the interests of the service. There is also no obviously wrongful exercise of discretion. The grounds given by the Commission for the applicant's transfer are indeed plausible: what is concerned is the intention to establish a certain mobility in all departments including the Translation Department. The defendant is of the view that for a translator to spend a very long period in the same administrative unit leads to a certain rigidity with the consequences that his performance, both quantitative and qualitative, declines. The applicant's reply to this is in my view not sufficient to show that that argument is mistaken. Mr Kindermann does not basically contest the expediency of a policy of staff mobility. He thinks however that it is ill-suited to the specific position of translators in general and in particular of those who at the cost of a long and difficult apprenticeship had specialized in a technical area such as that of social security for migrant workers, which requires its own vocabulary. Relying in particular on certain extracts from the Practical Guide for Translators, he thus maintains that specialization is particularly necessary for translators, that it is carried out to a large extent in the Commission's departments and that the quality of the work has improved because it has made possible closer relations between the translators and the departments using their services. The Administrative Commission itself is a significant example of the success of that policy of rapprochement. The Commission has countered this with other quotations from the Practical Guide for Translators which stress the need for mobility and flexibility between the various translation sections. This issue between experts can hardly be resolved by the Court. Having regard to the Court's limited power of review in this matter I can only say that I find nothing absurd in the contention that even a conscientious official who has been translating the same kind of text for almost ten years the whole day long runs the risk of suffering a certain ossification which the administration may rightly attempt to prevent or remedy by employing that official in a different way. (f) Finally the applicant considers that the decision taken in regard to him is, contrary to what the administration maintains, in no way in his interest but is detrimental to it. It diminishes his prospects of promotion particularly because in his new employment his work is systematically checked although in the Administrative Commission he had acquired a certain skill permitting him from time to time to check the work of his colleagues. It seems to me that no account can be taken of that argument in the present case. A change in employment without a geographical change or change in the definition of the basic post of the official in question does not in my view involve any “essential personal interests” which require to be taken into account “in examining the question whether this decision is appropriate”, to use the phraseology of my opinion in the Geist case (at p. 1442). Further it is not certain that that contention is fully in accordance with the facts. In the assessment of the applicant for 1975/77 it was essentially his age, seniority and education which militated in favour of his promotion. The first two factors are even more favourable to him today. As far as his legal education is concerned, the applicant had the opportunity after leaving the Administrative Commission of making specially valuable use of it, for, as we heard at the hearing, he recently took the place of a lawyer-linguist on a temporary basis. Finally his new employment enables him to broaden his horizons since, within the Dutch Translation Division, he now belongs to the special section dealing with social matters, administration and information, whose activities are wider than those of the Administrative Commission.