16 MARCH 1965 (1)

Mr President,

Members of the Court,

I give the following opinion on the application for interpretation of a judgment, the admissibility of which has just been the subject of this hearing. The application is based on Article 37 of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the ECSC of which only the French version is authoritative; it is moreover identical with the French version of Article 40 of the EEC Statute and with Article 41 of the EAEC Statute. According to that version, the application for interpretation of a judgment presumes the existence of doubt as to the meaning or scope of the judgment and the establishment of an interest therein (judgment in Case 5/55, Rec. 1954-1955, pp. 275 et seq.).

The High Authority's application or 18 December 1964 must be considered in the light of these requirements.

The doubts as to the interpretation of the judgment indicated in that application are plainly concerned with contradictory concepts between different departments or between different servants of the High Authority and not with views on interpretation which form the subject of the disputes between the parties in Case 70/63 or between a litigant and an institution not a party to the proceedings. However, according to the correct interpretation, the latter is not an essential condition for the application of Article 37 of the Statute. On the contrary, it is sufficient that an individual or an institution concerned puts forward serious reasons proving that a judgment can be interpreted in such and such a way and that there is, therefore, doubt or a lack of clarity as to the tenor of a judgment, as is required, for example, by paragraph 458 of the Strafprozeßordnung (German Code of Criminal Procedure) on the interpretation of penal judgments. Therefore to this extent the admissibility of the application cannot give rise to objections.

Likewise, the case-law of the Court has already decided that not only the operative part of the judgment but also the grounds forming the basis of the judgment may be the subject of an application for interpretation, so that, from this point of view as well, the High Authority's application cannot give rise to objections.

Finally, in my opinion, the question of the period of time in which the application must be made presents no difficulties, for the simple reason that Article 37 provides no period in which to make such an application, as opposed to the other regulations in the Statute (revision of a judgment, third-party proceedings).

The question then remains what is to be understood by the words ‘meaning or scope of a judgment’ in Article 37 of the Statute.

On this point the High Authority's application for interpretation seems to me to raise problems. In fact the actual wording of the crucial question is not the only point on which there are doubts. The question is as follows: ‘Do the grounds appearing at B, 3, of the judgment have the effect of a principle consequently extending in their application beyond the particular case governed by the operative part of the judgment?’. Furthermore, these doubts are reinforced by the statement of reasons in the application relating to this question, according to which one of the two arguments quoted on the meaning of the judgment in Case 70/63 consists in saying that the annulment of an individual measure within the context of litigation where the Court has unlimited jurisdiction may only have to a relative extent the force of res judicata, whilst according to the other argument it may be deduced from the general wording of the judgment that all servants whose classification was altered by the new provisions on career brackets of January 1962 were recognized as being entitled to have carried forward to the new grade the seniority acquired in the former grade.

According to the letter of the provision, Article 37 of the Statute of the Court certainly encompasses the possibility of such an interpretation as well, since it falls within the concept of the ‘scope of a judgment’. However, so broad a concept with regard to the possibilities in proceedings for interpretation does not appear to correspond to the true purposes of Article 37.

Properly understood, Article 37 is intended to facilitate the clear elaboration of the will expressed in a judicial decision, where it remains obscure or where doubts exist. In other words, it is necessary to find how the Court as a whole conceived its exact line of thought in the case to be settled, that is to say, a decision which has been taken is to be explained and supplemented within the framework in which a decision of the Court or of one of its Chambers is possible at all.

This would be the case in the proceedings of which an interpretation is requested, which involved the classification of a servant, if the judgment lacked clarity as to how the servant was to be classified. However, the very fact that the applicant in Case 70/73 has expressly declared that he does not wish to defend a personal interest in the application for interpretation made by the High Authority shows that that kind of doubt as to interpretation does not arise in this case.

In fact, the High Authority's application for interpretation has another purpose. The applicant does not wish for clarification of the will of the Court which gave the judgment in Case 70/63; it simply desires a reply on the legal scope of the judgments of the Court, at any rate of its judgments on matters concerning the staff. Properly expressed, a question of interpretation of the Treaty is at issue, thus a clarification of the will of the authors of the Treaty, and not clarification of the will of the Members of the Court. Article 37 is not the appropriate method for that. On the contrary, as the Treaty and the Statute of the Court do not recognize a general procedure for the interpretation of the Treaty, the High Authority or the other institutions who desire an interpretation of the legal scope of the judgments of the Court may only take an appropriate administrative decision and raise the point in the course of ordinary legal proceedings relating to that decision.

This therefore leads me to the conclusion that the application of the High Authority for an interpretation of the judgment must be dismissed as inadmissible.

With regard to the costs in these proceedings for interpretation, the sole question to be asked is who must bear the costs occasioned by the statement of the applicant in Case 70/63. On this point I do not perceive any particular difficulty. As the applicant, as a party to the previous proceedings, is entitled to be heard, and as the High Authority for its part commenced this case without due cause, the latter must bear the applicant's costs.

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(1) Translated from the French version.