Keywords

Summary



Keywords

1. Council — Permanent Representatives Committee — Own powers — None — Implementing powers — Scope — (EC Treaty, Arts 145 and 151(1))

2. Actions for annulment of measures — Actionable measures — Definition — Measures having binding legal effects — Council decision giving the Member States the right to vote in the Food and Agriculture Organization for the adoption of an international agreement — (EC Treaty, Art. 173)

3. Community law — Interpretation — Acts of the institutions — Statement of the Council entered in its minutes — Whether to be taken into consideration — Not permissible in the absence of any reference to it in the act itself

4. International agreements — Agreement falling partly within the competence of the Community and partly within that of the Member States — Need for close cooperation between the Member States and the Community institutions — Arrangement between the Council and the Commission concerning the right to vote in an international organization — Arrangement providing for voting rights to be exercised by the Commission in areas essentially within the exclusive competence of the Community — Council decision giving the Member States the right to vote for the adoption of an agreement to promote compliance with international conservation and management measures by fishing vessels on the high seas — Breach of the arrangement — Unlawful

Summary

1. The Permanent Representatives ' Committee is not an institution of the Communities upon which the Treaty confers powers of its own but an auxiliary body of the Council, for which it carries out preparation and implementation work, as is clear from Article 145 of the Treaty, which provides that the Council shall have power to take decisions, and from Article 151(1), which provides that Coreper is responsible for preparing the work of the Council and for carrying out the tasks assigned to it by the Council.

Since Coreper ' s function of carrying out the tasks assigned to it by the Council does not give it the power to take decisions which belongs, under the Treaty, to the Council, a decision giving the Member States the right to vote in an international organization for the adoption of an agreement cannot be ascribed to Coreper or regarded as confirming a previous Coreper decision.

2. A decision of the Council giving the Member States the right to vote in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for the adoption of an agreement to promote compliance with international conservation and management measures by fishing vessels on the high seas constitutes an act having legal effects and thus one against which an action for annulment may be brought under Article 173 of the Treaty.

As regards relations between the Community and the Member States, between the institutions of the Community and between the Community and its Member States on the one hand and other subjects of international law, especially the said organization and its Member States, on the other, that decision had legal consequences which preclude it from being regarded as a matter purely of procedure or protocol.

3. A statement entered in the minutes of the Council meeting at which a decision was taken cannot be used for the purpose of determining the scope of that decision where no reference is made to the content of that statement in the text of the decision in question, and therefore has no legal significance.

4. Where, in implementation of the obligation of close cooperation between the Member States and the Community institutions which flows from the requirement of unity in the international representation of the Community, the Council and the Commission have entered into an arrangement which they intended as a binding commitment towards each other and under which, once a common position is established, the Commission is to exercise the right to vote in the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in areas falling essentially within the exclusive competence of the Community, a decision of the Council giving the Member States the right to vote for the adoption of an agreement to promote compliance with international conservation and management measures by fishing vessels on the high seas must be annulled because it is in breach of that arrangement; the subject-matter of such an agreement falls essentially within the exclusive competence of the Community as regards conservation of the biological resources of the sea.