VG, successor in title to MS v European Commission.
Date: 2019-04-11
28


In order to decide which court has jurisdiction to hear and determine a specific action brought against the Union seeking compensation for damage, it is necessary to determine whether the action in question concerns the Union’s contractual liability or its non-contractual liability (judgment of 18 April 2013, Commission v Systran and Systran Luxembourg, C‑103/11 P, EU:C:2013:245, paragraph 61 and the case-law cited).
29


To that end, the Courts of the European Union cannot simply rely on the rules cited by the parties. Thus, the mere invocation of rules of law not flowing from a contract relevant in the case, but which are binding on the parties, cannot have the consequence of altering the contractual nature of the dispute and thus removing it from the jurisdiction of the competent court. If it were otherwise, the nature of the dispute and, consequently, the competent court, could be changed at the whim of the rules invoked by the parties, which would go against the rules on the jurisdiction of the various courts ratione materiae (see, to that effect, judgment of 18 April 2013, Commission v Systran and Systran Luxembourg, C‑103/11 P, EU:C:2013:245, paragraphs 64 and 65 and the case-law cited).
30


In that context, the Courts of the European Union are required to verify whether the action for compensation before them has as its subject matter a claim for damages based objectively and overall on rights and obligations of a contractual nature or of a non-contractual nature. For those purposes, those courts must examine, on an analysis of the various matters in the file, such as, for example, the rule of law allegedly infringed, the nature of the damage claimed, the conduct complained of and the legal relations between the parties in question, whether there exists between them a genuine contractual context, linked to the subject matter of the dispute, the in-depth examination of which proves to be indispensable for the resolution of the said action (judgment of 18 April 2013, Commission v Systran and Systran Luxembourg, C‑103/11 P, EU:C:2013:245, paragraph 66).
31


In the second place, it should be borne in mind that the duty of the General Court under Article 36 of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union and the first paragraph of Article 53 thereof to state the reasons for its judgments does not require that court to provide an account that follows exhaustively and one by one all the arguments put forward by the parties to the dispute. Therefore, so long as the statement of reasons clearly and unequivocally discloses the General Court’s thinking, the reasoning may be implicit, on condition that it enables the persons concerned to ascertain the reasons why the measures in question were taken and the Court of Justice to have sufficient evidence to exercise its power of review (see, to that effect, judgment of 30 May 2018, L’Oréal v EUIPO, C‑519/17 P and C‑522/17 P to C‑525/17 P, not published, EU:C:2018:348, paragraph 67 and the case-law cited).
38


Even assuming that that quotation can be understood as excluding the existence of an employment contract, since the letter of agreement ruled out any remuneration and did not provide for any legal hierarchical relationship, the fact that there was no such contract between the Commission and the members of the Team Europe network does not exclude the existence of other obligations agreed between those persons, so that a relationship existed between them that can nonetheless be classified as ‘contractual’ (see, by analogy, judgment of 14 July 2016, Granarolo, C‑196/15, EU:C:2016:559, paragraph 25).
47


According to the settled case-law of the Court of Justice, it is apparent from Article 256(1) TFEU and the first paragraph of Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union that an appeal is to be limited to points of law and that the General Court therefore has exclusive jurisdiction to find and appraise the relevant facts and to assess the evidence. The assessment of the facts and evidence does not, save where the facts or evidence are distorted, constitute a point of law, which is subject, as such, to review by the Court of Justice on appeal. Such a distortion must be obvious from the documents on the Court’s file, without there being any need to carry out a new assessment of the facts and evidence (judgment of 15 May 2019, CJ v ECDC, C‑170/18 P, not published, EU:C:2019:410, paragraph 39 and the case-law cited).
48


Where an appellant alleges distortion of the evidence by the General Court, he must, under Article 256 TFEU, the first paragraph of Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union and Article 168(1)(d) of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice, indicate precisely the evidence alleged to have been distorted by the General Court and show the errors of appraisal which, in his view, led to such distortion (judgment of 6 September 2018, Klein v Commission, C‑346/17 P, EU:C:2018:679, paragraph 126 and the case-law cited).