Commission of the European Communities v Infront WM AG.
Date: 2008-03-13
47. In accordance with settled case-law, the condition that the decision must be of direct concern to a natural or legal person, as laid down in the fourth paragraph of Article 230 EC, requires the contested Community measure to affect directly the legal situation of the individual and leave no discretion to its addressees, who are entrusted with the task of implementing it, such implementation being purely automatic and resulting from Community rules without the application of other intermediate rules (see, in particular, Dreyfus  v Commission , cited above, paragraph 43; Case C‑486/01 P Front national  v Parliament  [2004] ECR I‑6289, paragraph 34; and Case C‑417/04 P Regione Siciliana  v Commission  [2006] ECR I‑3881, paragraph 28).
56. By so doing, the Court of First Instance did not reverse the burden of proof on the parties. It made an unfettered assessment of the facts which were intended to establish the reality of cross-frontier broadcasting of the designated events. In that regard, the Court of First Instance is free to take account of the fact that a party has refrained from adducing evidence in support of its own allegations (see Case C‑214/05 P Rossi  v OHIM  [2006] ECR I-7057, paragraph 23).
57. Moreover it is settled case-law that an appeal lies on points of law only and that the Court of First Instance thus has exclusive jurisdiction to find and appraise the relevant facts and assess the evidence. The appraisal of those facts and the assessment of that evidence thus do not, save where the facts and evidence are distorted, constitute a point of law which is subject, as such, to review by the Court of Justice on appeal (see Case C‑104/00 P DKV  v OHIM  [2002] ECR I‑7561, paragraph 22 and the case-law cited).
70. It is settled case-law that persons other than those to whom a decision is addressed may claim to be individually concerned only if that decision affects them by reason of certain attributes which are peculiar to them or by reason of circumstances in which they are differentiated from all other persons and by virtue of these factors distinguishes them individually just as in the case of the person addressed by such a decision (see, particularly, Case 25/62 Plaumann  v Commission  [1963] ECR 95 , @ 107, and Case C‑78/03 P Commission  v Aktionsgemeinschaft Recht und Eigentum  [2005] ECR I-10737, paragraph 33).
71. It is also clear from the Court’s case-law that where the decision affects a group of persons who were identified or identifiable when that measure was adopted by reason of criteria specific to the members of the group, those persons might be individually concerned by that measure inasmuch as they form part of a limited class of traders (see Case 11/82 Piraiki-Patraiki and Others  v Commission  [1985] ECR 207, paragraph 31, and Joined Cases C‑182/03 and C‑217/03 Belgium and Forum 187  v Commission  [2006] ECR I-5479, paragraph 60).
72. As the Advocate General observed in paragraphs 99 and 100 of his Opinion, that can be the case particularly when the decision alters rights acquired by the individual prior to its adoption (see, particularly, Joined Cases 106/63 and 107/63 Toepfer and Getreide-Import Gesellschaft v Commission  [1965] ECR 405, @ 411).