Ralf Schräder v Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO).
Date: 2010-04-15
69. In accordance with Article 225(1) EC and the first paragraph of Article 58 of the Statute of the Court of Justice, an appeal lies on points of law only. The General Court has exclusive jurisdiction to find and appraise the relevant facts and to assess the evidence. The appraisal of those facts and the assessment of that evidence thus does not, save where they distort the facts or evidence, constitute a point of law which is subject, as such, to review by the Court of Justice on appeal (see, inter alia, Case C‑104/00 P DKV  v OHIM  [2002] ECR I‑7561, paragraph 22, and Case C‑173/04 P Deutsche SiSi-Werke  v OHIM  [2006] ECR I‑551, paragraph 35).
75. As regards the arguments that the General Court distorted the facts and the evidence when it assessed the arguments based on Mrs Heine’s statements and on the possible impact of environmental factors on the differences between the reference variety and the candidate variety, it must be pointed out that the General Court is the sole judge of any need to supplement the information available to it in respect of the cases before it. Whether or not the evidence before it is sufficient is a matter to be appraised by it alone and is not subject to review by the Court of Justice on appeal, except where that evidence has been distorted or the inaccuracy of the findings of the General Court is apparent from the documents in the case‑file (Joined Cases C‑75/05 P and C‑80/05 P Germany and Others  v Kronofrance  [2008] ECR I‑6619, paragraph 78 and case-law cited).
76. Facts not submitted by the parties before the departments of the CPVO cannot be submitted at the stage of the action brought before the General Court. The General Court is called upon to assess the legality of the decision of the Board of Appeal by reviewing the application of European Union law made by that board, particularly in the light of facts which were submitted to the latter, but that Court cannot carry out such a review by tak ing into account matters of fact newly produced before it (see, by analogy, Case C‑29/05 P OHIM  v Kaul  [2007] ECR I‑2213, paragraph 54).
77. In addition, it must be recalled that the General Court, which has jurisdiction only within the limits set by Article 73(2) of Regulation No 2100/94, was not required to carry out a complete review in order to determine whether or not the SUMCOL 01 variety lacked distinctness for the purposes of Article 7(1) of Regulation No 2100/94 but that it was entitled, in the light of the scientific and technical complexity of that condition, compliance with which must be verified by means of a technical examination which, as is clear from Article 55 of Regulation No 2100/94, is to be entrusted by the CPVO to one of the competent national offices, to limit itself to a review of manifest errors of assessment.
122. In that regard it should be recalled that it is settled case-law that the Court of Justice will reject outright complaints directed against grounds of a judgment of the General Court included purely for the sake of completeness since they cannot lead to the judgment being set aside and are therefore nugatory (Case C‑184/01 P Hirschfeldt  v AEE  [2002] ECR I‑10173, paragraph 48).