PECULIARITIES OF THE ACTION FOR ANNULMENT AGAINST DECISIONS OF THE EU DECENTRALISED AGENCIES’ BOARDS OF APPEAL
PECULIARITIES OF THE ACTION FOR ANNULMENT AGAINST DECISIONS OF THE EU DECENTRALISED AGENCIES’ BOARDS OF APPEAL

Summary/Abstract: There are ten EU decentralized agencies empowered to take decisions that are intended to produce legal effect vis-à-vis private persons in the context of regulating the internal market. In order to ensure effective protection of the rights of private persons against these agencies, EU law establishes mechanisms of internal and external legal control of their decisions. Internal control is achieved through the mechanism of administrative appeals before the Boards of Appeal (BoAs) established within each of the agencies. The BoA’s decision on the appeal is final and legally binding on the parties to the appeal proceedings. It is therefore the subject matter of an action for annulment before the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), which ensures external control of the agency decisions. The action for annulment of the BoA’s decision is subject to the same rules that apply to the annulment of any act of EU law intended to produce legal effects vis-à-vis third parties, but there are certain peculiarities in the context of the judicial review of the agency decisions. These peculiarities exist in four aspects of the action for annulment, namely: 1) the jurisdiction of the CJEU; 2) the grounds for annulment – the scope and intensity of the review performed by the BoA; 3) the effects of the first-instance judgment – alteration of the BoA’s decision in some agencies; and 4) the appeal against the first instance judgment – filtering mechanism under Art. 58a of the CJEU Statute. These peculiarities are the subject of this paper.

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