Opinion of Mr Advocate General Darmon

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

1. In 1985, with a view to filling a permanent post of administrator in Career Bracket A 7 — A 6, the Court of Auditors, in its capacity as Appointing Authority, organized Internal Competition No CC/A/8/85. In that connection it published a Notice of Competition and appointed a Selection Board.

2. Let us therefore examine the applications lodged by Mr Hoyer and Mr Neumann whose cases were joined by an order of the Court of 9 April 1986 in view of the connection between them.

3. The applicants claim that the Court should annul the decisions of the Selection Board on the following grounds:

4. The Court of Auditors, the defendant, submits that the applications are well founded.

5. No objection was raised to the admissibility of the application. As the Court has held, decisions of a Selection Board assessing the merits of a candidate may be the subject of a direct application to the Court (Case 144/82 Detti cited above; and judgment of 14 June 1972 in Case 44/71 Marcato v Commission [1972] ECR 427).

6. There is therefore no problem in annulling the contested decisions, thus removing not so much a dispute, since there is no point of contention between the parties, as a legal impasse. To do that, there is no need to change the case-law, which the defendant urges the Court to do and for which the legal conditions, to mention only those, are not, in my view, satisfied in this case. The Court of Auditors in its capacity as Appointing Authority did not think that it should quash the contested decisions in place of the Court. The Court need not therefore rule on the question whether it had the power to do so.

1 Translated from the French