Opinion of Mr Advocate General Mancini

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

1. The application dated 2 July 1984 initiating this action contains a series of claims made by Lars Bo Rasmussen, an official of the Commission of the European Communities in Grade A6, against the Commission. He is seeking:

2. On 1 March 1975 Mr Rasmussen, who has a degree in economics, a further degree in political science and an excellent knowledge of languages, was employed by the Office for Official Publications of the European Communities in Luxembourg in order to draw up the monthly and annual alphabetical indexes and methodological tables of the Official Journal. The computerization of the system by which the index was prepared necessitated a reorganization of the office and Mr Rasmussen, who had no knowledge of the new electronic technology, found it hard to adapt and began to entertain misgivings as to his career prospects. From 1975 he tried to obtain posts in Grade A5 not only in the Commission (and in particular in the Translation Service) but also in Parliament and the Court of Auditors.

3. In his four submissions Mr Rasmussen alleges infringement of the following provisions of the Staff Regulations of Officials :

4. Before assessing whether those submissions are well founded, it is necessary to examine a plea of inadmissibility raised by the Commission. It alleges that the claims set out in the application did not appear in the vague and general complaint received from Mr Rasmussen on 1 December 1983. In particular the complaint did not contain any request that he should be reinstated in the Publications Office and therefore excluded any such possibility. The request that he should be assigned to an appropriate post, on the other hand, does not take account of the fact that the decision of 17 June 1984 drew the applicant's attention to the notice of Internal Competition No COM/52/84.

5. I will begin by considering submission (a). According to the applicant, the administration is obliged under Articles 5 and 7 of the Staff Regulations to assign an official to a post which corresponds to the grade which he occupies in his category. That rule is so fundamental that no derogation may be made from it by agreement between the official and the institution concerned. Furthermore, by allowing himself to be placed at the disposal of the Statistical Office in order, in the interests of the service, to resolve his own career difficulties, Mr Rasmussen did not conclude any agreement. In fact, as soon as he discovered that his administrative position was irregular, he asked for it to be regularized. He stated that a transfer to the Language Service would be satisfactory to him only if he was classed as a reviser.

6. In his second submission Mr Rasmussen alleges that Article 25 of the Staff Regulations has been infringed. He contends that because the measures by which he was placed at the disposal of other departments were decisions relating to a specific individual, they should have stated the grounds on which they were based and should have been communicated to him in writing, posted in the premises of the institution to which he belonged and published in the Monthly Staff Bulletin.

7. In his third submission the applicant claims that there has been an infringement of Article 38 (g), which states that when his secondment ends an official is at once to be reinstated in the post which he formerly occupied. The applicant alleges that by refusing to reinstate him the Commission has infringed the principles that legitimate expectations and acquired rights should be protected.

8. In his fourth and final submission the applicant claims that Article 45 of the Staff Regulations was infringed and the prohibition of discrimination between officials was breached. Article 45 provides as follows: Promotion shall be exclusively by selection from among officials who have completed a minimum period in their grade, after consideration of the comparative merits of the officials eligible for promotion and of the report on them. According to Mr Rasmussen, it is impossible to consider the comparative merits of an official who, like him, is deprived of an actual post and unable to carry out his own duties; consequently, the basic requirements for him to be promoted are not met and he is thereby discriminated against as compared with other officials.

9. For all the reasons set out above, I propose that the action brought on 2 July 1984 by Mr Lars Bo Rasmussen against the Commission of the European Communities should be dismissed and the parties should be ordered to bear their own costs in accordance with Article 70 of the Rules of Procedure.

1 Translated from the Italian.