19.12.2016

EN

Official Journal of the European Union

C 475/19

(Case T-729/16)

(2016/C 475/29)

Language of the case: French

Parties

Applicants: PO (Brussels, Belgium), PP (Beijing, China), PQ (Beijing), PR (Beijing) (represented by: N. de Montigny and J.-N. Louis, lawyers)

Defendant: European External Action Service

Form of order sought

The applicants claim that the Court should:

—annul:

—the decisions of 17 December 2015 to limit to EUR 10 000 the school fees incurred by the applicants;

—given the specific context of the notification of the measure adversely affecting the applicants, in so far as necessary, the email of 21 December 2015, which some of them received; in so far as necessary, the allowance evaluation form; and, last, in so far as necessary, their payslips mentioning the amount of the allowance received;

—as necessary, last, the rejections of their claims of 5 July 2016;

—order the defendant to pay the costs.

Pleas in law and main arguments

In support of the action, the applicants rely on four pleas in law.

1.First plea in law: a plea of illegality, in so far as the contested decisions are based on the Guidelines, adopted by the European External Action Service (EEAS) on 31 July 2014, which infringe the Staff Regulations and Annex X thereto.

2.Second plea in law: a plea of illegality, in so far as the contested decisions infringe those Guidelines.

3.Third plea in law: divided into four parts, based on the illegality of the individual decisions.

—The first part alleges infringement of acquired rights, breach of legitimate expectations, and infringement of the principles of legal certainty and of sound administration, in so far as each of the applicants decided to be accompanied by his or her family on delegation to the country concerned, proceeding on the assumption that school fees would be reimbursed in full.

—The second part alleges infringement of the principles of equal treatment and of non-discrimination, in so far as a system of supplementary reimbursement limited to a flat-rate payment of EUR 10 000, established independently of the specific situation of each delegation, amounts to treating different situations in an identical manner.

—The third part alleges infringement of the rights of the child, and of the right to family life and the right to education, in so far as the EEAS imposes a heavy financial burden on certain households of officials or temporary agents, those families being then obliged to decide whether to bear that burden in order to provide their children with an education equivalent to that of the children of their colleagues, or to separate and provide such an education, at a lower cost, in one of the countries of the European Union.

—The fourth part alleges that there has been no effective weighing-up of interests and that there has been a failure to observe the principle of proportionality in each adopted decision, particularly in so far as the defendant has failed to show that the objective pursued justified the infringement of the applicants’ fundamental rights.

4.Fourth plea in law, alleging an error of assessment, which is invoked by three of the applicants. Two of them take the view that such an error was made in the analysis of the exceptional circumstances which had been put forward in their applications for reimbursement, while the last applicant considers such an error to have arisen from the failure to take into account the additional costs of teaching in the mother tongue.