Source: http://martinned.blogspot.co.uk/2012/06/
Timestamp: 2018-03-23 05:18:16
Document Index: 736674100

Matched Legal Cases: ['CJEU ', 'art. 106', 'CJEU ', 'art. 7', 'art. 10', 'art. 6', 'art. 1', 'art. 15', 'art. 23', 'art. 23', 'art. 4', 'art. 4', 'art. 4', 'art. 79', 'art. 146', 'art. 47', 'CJEU ']

Martinned: June 2012
This week’s Grand Chamber judgement (per Judge Lõhmus) is well outside my area of expertise: In trademark law, the prejudicial questions concerned “the identification of the goods and services for which the protection of a trade mark is sought” under Directive 2008/95. Whether the Court’s answers actually clarify anything is apparently still up for debate. Chartered Institute of Patent Attorneys v. Registrar of Trade Marks Cf. IPKat
BNP Paribas and BNL v. Commission is a case about state aid law and banking crisis restructuring, combined with creative corporate income tax law in Italy, so I’ll limit myself to the play-by-play: The Commission said it was unlawful state aid, the General Court (Judge Vilaras) agreed, and now the CJEU (per Judge Fernlund) decided that the review by the General Court was insufficient, but that the Commission’s Decision should still be upheld.
In Access to Documents law, the Court (per Judge Malenovský) annulled the General Court’s judgement in IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds v. Commission (per the German (!) Judge Dittrich) because, well, because the General Court hadn’t actually looked at the document in question. So now the General Court has to go and look at it to decide whether the Commission was entitled to refuse access on the grounds that the German government had prepared it and wanted it kept confidential. IFAW Internationaler Tierschutz-Fonds v. Commission
An interesting bit of copyrights law: Mr. Titus Donner will not get away with his attempts to circumvent the German copyrights law by ostensibly selling his infringing products from Italy. The Court (per Judge Schiemann) followed AG Jääskinen and chose reality over legal fiction, meaning that the defendant could go to jail for up to 5 years (cf. art. 106 and 108a of the UrhG). Donner
It sounds obvious enough when you say it out loud, but “the conditions of access to the labour market by Bulgarian students (…) may not be more restrictive than those set out in Directive 2004/114 on the conditions of admission of third‑country nationals for the purposes of studies, pupil exchange, unremunerated training or voluntary service.” Sommer v. Landesgeschäftsstelle des Arbeitsmarktservice Wien
The conclusion in Wolf Naturprodukte v. Sewar (per Judge Šváby) is simple enough: “Article 66(2) of Regulation 44/2001 [means] that, for that regulation to be applicable for the purpose of the recognition and enforcement of a judgment, it is necessary that at the time of delivery of that judgment the regulation was in force both in the Member State of origin and in the Member State addressed.”
In Sillogos Ellinon Poleodomon kai Khorotakton v. Ipourgos Perivallontos, Khorotaxias kai Dimosion Ergon, et al., the Court (per Judge Schiemann) goes over the law on environmental impact studies again.
I’m going to try not to say something harsh about ANGED v. FASGA et al. (per Judge Levits), at least not here: “Article 7(1) of Directive 2003/88 [precludes] national provisions under which a worker who becomes unfit for work during a period of paid annual leave is not entitled subsequently to the paid annual leave which coincided with the period of unfitness for work.”
On the same day as its reprimand by the CJEU in BNP Paribas and BNL v. Commission (see above), the General Court also got reprimanded by AG Bot for failing to “exercise its unlimited jurisdiction in considering the proportionality of the fine imposed by the European Commission on E.ON Energie AG”. Incidentally, the fine in question was € 38 million for breaking a seal. The Commission’s Decision is here, and the General Court judgement (per Judge Martins Ribeiro) is here. E.On v. Commission
AG Kokott, after citing Douglas Adams, sided with Italy in its ongoing dispute with EPSO. She argued that the General Court was wrong to conclude that a personnel posting that explicitly required a good knowledge of English, French or German needed to be published in full only in those three languages. According to the AG, the posting should have been in full in all 23 official languages. Italy v. Commission
AG Cruz Villlalón looks at the re-utilisation of the contents of databases under art. 7 of Directive 96/9 and comes up with an inconvenient answer. Whether it is also correct or not I do not have the expertise to say. Football Dataco et al. v. Sportradar
AG Bot’s opinion in Gülbahce v. Hamburg, which deals with – of course – the rights of Turkish workers in the Common Market, is a bit of a mixed bag for Turkish citizens. On the one hand, he explains that you cannot retroactively take away someone’s residence permit absent a showing of fraud, but on the other hand he proposed that the Court should put a stop to any attempt to leverage art. 10(1) of Decision 1/80 to get around the requirements listed in art. 6(1) for an extension of a residence permit.
Following last year’s Aladzhov, there is now another case before the Court about Bulgarians not being allowed to leave the country. This time, it’s not about an unpaid tax debt, but about an unpaid significant debt to another private citizen. AG Mengozzi concluded that such a ban on travelling abroad will not normally be consistent with EU law – which is in line with Aladzhov except formulated in reverse – and added that the plaintiff’s ability to challenge his travel ban in Bulgarian court left somewhat to be desired. Byankov v. Glaven sekretar na Ministerstvo na vatreshnite raboti
In competition law, the President of the Court two weeks ago upheld the decision of the President of the General Court not to allow Deutsche Bahn to intervene in the air freight cartel case. The fact that DB Schenker is a customer (as well as a potential competitor) of the cartel is not enough to give it a sufficient interest in the case, nor is the fact that it has a potential private damages claim. DB Schenker v. Lufthansa et al. (there are a whole number of orders but they are all the same).
Posted by martinned at Thursday, June 21, 2012 0 comments
Yesterday, EUObserver had an excellent - although perhaps somewhat optimistic - opinion article about the idea of creating a Benelux for the West-Balkans, or specifically for Albania, Macedonia, Kosovo and Montenegro. Before I focus on the little detail that particularly captivated me, I'd first like to briefly discuss the main idea.
To start with my main concern: As the Economist's Eastern Approaches explained only yesterday,
[People in the Balkan] are concerned about jobs, health care, the education of their children and pensions. These material worries preoccupy them much more than ethnic grudges or the desire to reconquer territory they believe their nation has lost to a neighbour.
That said, I foresee significant issues if Albania were to create such a union with Kosovo (90% ethnic Albanians), Macedonia (25%) and Montenegro (5%). The authors recognise that
It is important to convince the international audience that this is not some kind of greater Albania through the back door,
but offer no explanation as to how this should be done, or how the domestic audiences of the four participating countries should be convinced. Serbia and the Serb minority in Kosovo would go ballistic, and the Macedonians haven't forgotten about their country's brief civil war in 2001 either. Only Montenegro would seem to be confident enough about the place of their Albanian minority in overall society to consider joining AlMacKoM.
However, assuming this problem can be overcome, such a union would seem to me to be an excellent idea. It gives these countries a useful exercise in compromising and institution building at a small scale, allowing them to develop the skills they need to operate more effectively on the European and World stages. At the same time, great economic advantages are not to be expected, given how unimportant these countries are for each other's trade. Courtesy of the CIA World Factbook:
Albanian Exports: Italy 50.8%, Kosovo 6.2%, Turkey 5.9%, Greece 5.4%, China 5.5%
Albanian Imports: Italy 28%, Greece 13%, China 6.3%, Turkey 5.6%, Germany 5.6%
Macedonia Exports: Germany 20.2%, Italy 7.1%, Bulgaria 7.1%, Greece 6.4%
Macedonia Imports: Germany 11.5%, Russia 11.1%, Greece 8.3%, Bulgaria 8.2%, UK 7%, Turkey 5.1%, Italy 5.1%
Kosovo: No information available, but undoubtedly a major part of its trade is with Albania
Montenegro Exports: Serbia 17.5%, Hungary 16.9%, Croatia 10.1%
Montenegro Imports: Serbia 28.4%, Greece 7.9%, Bosnia and Herzegovina 7.6%
And that is before we even start talking about the low ratio of trade to GDP in many of these countries. In such a setting, the economies of these four countries have little to gain from integration, suggesting that the main advantage of creating an AlMacKoM are political and institutional.
So far so good. But where the article goes completely off the rails is here:
I think we can all agree that this is completely insane. The likelihood of any of these four countries joining the EU by 2030 is extremely remote. That is true even for Macedonia and Montenegro, who already have candidate status. For once, this is not a problem of the EU's legendary "absorption capacity", but rather a question of the institutional capabilities of these countries. As such, admitting four more countries with a combined population of about that of Bulgaria wouldn't challenge the EU overly much, as long as these countries were well governed, with strong democracy, rule of law, etc. Given that, especially in Kosovo and Albania, these things are utterly and totally missing, the probability of Kosovo joining in the next two decades is exactly zero. In no sense of the word is Kosovo today "where Croatia was in 1995". Croatia in 1995 had a functioning system of government, whereas Kosovo has a government that is only saved from utter bankruptcy by the fact that it is unable to actually spend all the money it has budgeted. Quoting the CIA:
Until 2011, Kosovo maintained a budget surplus as a result of efficient value added tax (VAT) collection at the borders and inefficient budget execution
This is why the authors are ultimately correct. Such a regional union would bring much needed institution-building. However, using EU-accession as an argument is probably unwise. Accession is still so far off that a failure to achieve noticeable advances in that direction will only create resentment. Instead, AlMacKoM should be sold on its own merits, as a way of wrestling control away from the political and criminal clans that currently run these countries, as a way of improving relations between four countries that have much in common, and, yes, also as a way of improving their economies.
Posted by martinned at Wednesday, June 20, 2012 0 comments
By way of unasked-for favour to my Ideas on Europe colleague Ron Patz, I thought I'd take a look at the pending case ofThesing and Bloomberg Finance v. ECB, which was in the news last week because the General Court held its hearing in the case. As far as Access to Documents cases go, this one is a whopper.
What the applicants want is access to two ECB documents about the way Greece cooked the books to get into the Euro, and about the way the EU authorities might have helped them or at least turned a blind eye:
A note entitled The impact on government deficit and debt from off-market swaps. The Greek case (SEC/GovC/X/10/88a);
A second note, entitled The Titlos transaction and possible existence of similar transactions impacting on the euro area government debt or deficit levels (SEC/GovC/X/10/88b).
The ECB argues, with some plausibility, that releasing these documents in 2010 would have caused insurmountable problems for Greece's credit position, and that releasing them now would still cause serious problems. (I'm distilling their arguments from this Bloomberg News article, because obviously the pleadings are not public and I did not personally attend the hearing. Note that the one of the authors of the article is Ms. Thesing, one of the applicants.)
"Disclosing the files when Bloomberg News first sought them in 2010 would have “fueled negative perceptions about Greece’s ability to honor its debt,” ECB lawyer Marta Lopez Torres said at a hearing of the European Union’s General Court in Luxembourg today. “It’s the same now with Spain” which “isn’t able to borrow money,” she said. “Markets are reacting in very volatile ways. It’s affecting the euro economy.”"
Unfortunately, that may or may not be an acceptable reason not to give access under the relevant legislation, includingRegulation 1049/2001.
Right off the bat, it is important to note that that Regulation only applies to the Commission, the Parliament and the Council, and not to the EU Agencies or to the ECB. (Cf. art. 1(a).) However, the Regulation implements art. 15 TFEU, which unfortunately also does not help the applicants:
3. Any citizen of the Union, and any natural or legal person residing or having its registered office in a Member State, shall have a right of access to documents of the Union’s institutions, bodies, offices and agencies, whatever their medium, subject to the principles and the conditions to be defined in accordance with this paragraph.
The Court of Justice of the European Union, the European Central Bank and the European Investment Bank shall be subject to this paragraph only when exercising their administrative tasks.(...)
When supervising Greece's Euro-shenanigans, the ECB quite obviously was not exercising an administrative task. However, turning to the ECB's Rules of Procedure, we find in art. 23:
The documents that are the subject of the current application are documents drawn up by the ECB, but not covered by art. 23.1. So we look for the Decision mentioned in par. 2. The structure of this Decision is analogous to the structure of Regulation 1049/2001; access is given unless an exception applies. Unfortunately for Bloomberg, these exceptions include plenty of basis for refusing access to the documents under discussion here, assuming they are as explosive as claimed:
1. The ECB shall refuse access to a document where disclosure would undermine the protection of:
(a) the public interest as regards: (...)
— the financial, monetary or economic policy of the Union or a Member State,
— the internal finances of the ECB or of the NCBs, (...)
— international financial, monetary or economic relations,
— the stability of the financial system in the Union or in a Member State;
6. The exceptions as laid down in this Article shall only apply for the period during which protection is justified on the basis of the content of the document. The exceptions may apply for a maximum period of 30 years unless specifically provided otherwise by the ECB's Governing Council. (...)
So unless the ECB is significantly overstating the potential damage that would be caused by releasing these documents, I don't see how the applicants can win. I certainly do not read art. 4 of ECB Decision 2004/3 as requiring an explicit weighing of the public interest in disclosure, as claimed by the applicants in their application to the Court. Such a balancing exercise is appropriate when dealing with the exceptions of art. 4(2), where it is explicitly required:
2. The ECB shall refuse access to a document where disclosure would undermine the protection of (...), unless there is an overriding public interest in disclosure.
From this it follows, reasoning a contrario, that no balancing is required under paragraph 1. Likewise, paragraph 3 also contemplates "an overriding public interest", but I do not read that as an alternative to paragraph 1, but rather as an additional filter. When it comes to internal documents, par. 3 says, the decision for which the documents have been prepared has to have already been taken, there has to be an overriding public interest justifying access, and only then do these documents get treated the same way as other documents.
In all of this I am somewhat hampered by the fact that I do not have access to the ECB's decision, or to the pleadings. From Bloomberg's application, it seems like the ECB also relied on art. 4(2) of Decision 2004/3, which is odd because the exceptions of par. 1 seem more than sufficient. So ultimately we shall have to see what the General Court does.
On Friday, I had dinner with some fellow die-hard cynics when another (and non-European) dinner guest raised the question of Grexit. To my surprise, their cynical answer was the complete opposite of mine.
My thinking on this matter was pretty much summed up in this post: Grexit and non-Grexit are both an unpredictable mess, except with different kinds of unpredictable. For this reason, I felt I could not make a recommendation either way, at least not on economics alone. Adding in my personal policy preferences, I suggested that Merkel should bite the bullet and cut the Greeks loose, and that the Greeks should try to stay in the Euro for as long as possible.
In terms of what I think will happen, this translates into the prediction that Mrs. Merkel will not spend a massive amount of political capital in order to do something that potentially cost just as many unknown hundreds of billions as kicking the Greeks out. This is a cynical prediction because it assumes that Mrs. Merkel will throw the Greeks, as well as the Portuguese, Spanish, Italians and Cypriots, under the bus for domestic political gain.
My interlocutors on Friday, however, deployed their cynicism in the opposite direction. To begin with, they denied the premise that European bailouts are unpopular in Germany. Instead, they argued that Grexit as such would be unpopular among German voters, because it would amount to a defeat for the European project. For this reason, they predicted that Mrs. Merkel would throw democracy under the bus to prevent a Grexit. In a nutshell, what they predicted was something along the lines of Piris' Two-Speed Europe, with a core of strong European countries like German, Finland and the Netherlands dictating a "growth package" to Greece as a condition for Greece staying in the Euro. This Growth Package would essentially mean that Greece would be mostly governed from Brussels.
In this scenario, not only would European democracy be sacrificed because this Growth Package would be pushed through at all cost, but even more seriously the Package would imply a serious and lengthy loss of sovereignty for bailout countries. No more right of veto for the Commission, but an outright Brussels diktat. All of this as the price for non-bankruptcy.
I have to say that it all sounds improbable to me. It came from intelligent and knowledgeable people, so I tried to consider the possibility carefully, but I don't see it happening.
To begin with, and even though I pointed this out on the night, I don't think they understand what fantastic amounts of money would be involved, and not just once but every year. Recently, Paul Krugman put the annual net transfer to Florida at $ 31 billion. That's a gift, not a loan. Likewise, as a result of the Savings & Loans crisis in the 1980s Texas received a gift of 25% of its GDP or $ 75 billion. When I did some back-of-the enveloppe comparisons between the suffering of net contributors in the EU and in the US in this post in March, I ended up with Denmark making a net contribution to the EU budget of 0,53% of its GDP and New Jersey losing out to the tune of 6,4%. The winners of this game, Lithuania and Mississippi, gained 5,33% and 16,9% of GDP, respectively. The paradox of the "political integration" idea is that, on the one hand, its proponents always repeat that the EU will never be like the US federal government - it will never govern social security, etc. in the same way - but on the other hand it is inevitable that it will have to generate comparable international money flows in order to do what it was meant to do: save the Euro.
These are two seemingly distinct yet connected problems. Political union will have to do one or both of two things: reduce the trade imbalance between the core and the periphery by creating growth among the latter, which seems difficult in the middle of a global economic crisis and ongoing banking issues, and prevent a further escalation of the debt crisis by replacing loans by grants. Put crudely: if we're not going to kick Greece out of the Euro, we're going to have to start giving them money outright. Not even ECB operations are enough to keep Greece solvent and liquid without them.
Now the question that the politicians will have to answer - if they want political union rather than Grexit - is: Which form do we give these transfers? The most obvious short-term candidate seems EU-FDIC. We insure periphery banks, and give them a prize for every bank they manage to collapse. And this is merely the most palatable policy initiative. Anything else that Merkel and Hollande could come up with to explain why they're sending money Southwards is going to be even more unpopular. The Wiedervereinigung is one thing, at least that involved sending massive amounts of money fellow-Germans and having massive numbers of fellow-Germans move in next door. How can such a thing ever be sold on a pan-European level?
The second big problem with the "throwing democracy under the bus" scenario is a legal one. While I was being accused of being "too much of a lawyer", I think that is too easy. While the Bundesverfassungsgericht has so far always limited itself to barking without biting, I don't think it would uphold a drastic Europeanisation of the power to tax-and-spend. Under the Lisbon-judgement, that is a core power of the democratically elected Bundestag that cannot even be transferred to the (in my opinion but not theirs) equally democratically elected European Parliament. While there is some uncertainty about whether the Ewigkeitsklausul of art. 79(3) GG also covers the writing of an entirely new Verfassung under art. 146 GG, in practice I don't see how such a loophole could matter, because I can't imagine the German people using it in order to overrule the Constitutional Court. For that, the status of the Court is much too high.
This is why I cannot escape the conclusion that throwing the periphery countries under the bus, rather than putting democracy there, is the path of least resistance for Mrs. Merkel and her Dutch and Finnish friends. Am I wrong?
Posted by martinned at Monday, June 18, 2012 0 comments
Posted by martinned at Thursday, June 14, 2012 0 comments
Posted by martinned at Wednesday, June 13, 2012 0 comments
Labels: Rail, This Week in Luxembourg
This week’s Grand Chamber judgement (well, the one that’s not about the CAP) upholds the General Court’s state aid judgement in EDF v. Commission. The Commission erred by not applying the private investor test to judge the offending tax waiver in the context of the French state’s overall relationship with EDF. Commission v. EDF (per Judge Arabadjiev) Cf. European Law Blog
Much as in economic terms there are only a few air passenger transport companies, legally every airline is still a separate company, and is entitled to be treated as such, for example when it comes to counting years of experience “with the company” for employee remuneration purposes. Counting in this way does not constitute unlawful age discrimination. Tyrolean Airways v. Betriebsrat Bord der Tyrolean Airways (per Judge Arabadjiev)
In Vinkov v. Nachalnik Administrativno-nakazatelna deynost (per Judge Toader), the prejudicial question was declared inadmissible on the grounds that it constituted a wholly internal situation. That’s a pity, because all sorts of fun could have potentially been had with the question of whether the right to an effective remedy (art. 47 Charter) requires access to court for any and all traffic tickets.
Professionally speaking, my case of the week is Westbahn v. ÖBB-Infrastruktur. Westbahn is a new entrant on the Austrian long-distance railway market (Vienna-Salzburg, to be precise), and they now have the support of AG Jääskinen for the claim that ÖBB should treat their trains and ÖBB’s own trains the same when it comes to passenger information in case of delay. It looks like the AG went with the objectives of the Regulation. Cf. Recent Developments in European Consumer Law Blog
There are quite a few interesting things going on in AG Trstenjak’s opinion in the asset freeze case of Al-Aqsa. On the one hand, Al-Aqsa is trying to get the CJEU to overrule the grounds upon which the General Court rested its holding, but not the holding itself. (After all, Al-Aqsa won.) The AG argues that you can’t appeal dicta. On the other hand, the Netherlands is still trying to salvage its SNAFU of having repealed the national decision upon which the EU decision rested immediately after said EU decision was taken, “because it was now redundant”. But no luck, Al-Aqsa’s assets remain unfrozen.
AG Bot argues that once again a Member State (Germany, in this case) should lose in a Turkish workers case. 3rd country nationals (a Thai, in this case) who have been married to Turkish workers for a significant amount of time are a “member of the family” of said worker, and therefore enjoy the same free movement rights. This is still true after they divorce. Dülger v. Wetteraukreis
The General Court rejected ICI’s action for annulment against its € 91 million cartel fine. (Cf. Commission Decision) As far as I can see, there is nothing but nuts & bolts competition law here. ICI v. Commission (per Judge Labucka)
Posted by martinned at Thursday, June 07, 2012 0 comments
It is always interesting to see how railway reform, whatever its effects on overall efficiency, has the unerring ability create work for lawyers. The most recent reminder is the combination of reform and competition law. Specifically: merger review.
The history of this mess is as follows: When the Dutch railways were unbundled in 1995, the task of informing passengers about delays was given to both the transport companies (particularly: NS) and the infrastructure company (ProRail). From an engineering point of view, that makes sense, because they both do things that cause delays and they both do things that make delays go away. Unfortunately, economic logic rarely pays heed to engineering logic, and economic logic dictates that such a division of labour results in both parties constantly blaming each other for everything and anything that goes wrong. Which is exactly what happened. Plenty of blaming, not a lot of improvement. Not even when the Minister started handing out fines.
(Or, in the category of lies, damned lies and statistics, the percentage of passengers who rate the quality of information in case of delay with a 7/10 or higher went up from 33% in 2001 to 54% in 2011, which, I guess, technically qualifies as an improvement. Unfortunately, the government-set target for 2011 was 56%, which will increase to 58% by 2015.)
So it was decided that economic logic should prevail: Let the transport people inform passengers, and whatever information they need from ProRail they can get by yelling at them. This year's € 300.000 fine was the last time ProRail got in trouble with the government over passenger information.
Now back to the question of employment for lawyers: In order to give effect to the government's decision, NS has to "acquire" the department of ProRail that is responsible for information to passengers. Never mind that this department probably consists of two 0.4 fte staffers and a desktop computer, and never mind that both are 100% owned by the Dutch state. And because this acquisition is going to take place in a market full of competition problems, where the selling party has a 100% market share and the acquiring party a market share of about 90%, they have to jump through all the hoops set up by the Competition Act (Mededingingswet), including the official notification of an intended (!) merger, whereby interested parties are invited to comment on the intended merger, whereby a company of which the State is the only shareholder intends to acquire a department of another company of which the State is the only shareholder. (That's pretty much what it says in paragraph 1 of the notification.) If anyone wants to comment, they'd better hurry, because the term is 7 days after the date of posting, i.e. until tomorrow.
So yes, in these dire economic times, it is good to be a lawyer. Too bad those b**rds in Groningen gave me an LL.M. title without effet civile. But that's a conversation for another time...
Posted by martinned at Wednesday, June 06, 2012 0 comments