1.The Council claims that the application is inadmissible in so far as it is intended to obtain a declaration that Regulation No 2761/81 is void.According to the settled case-law of the Court, the following three conditions must be fulfilled for a natural or legal person other than a Member State or a Community institution to be able to contest a regulation pursuant to the second paragraph of Article 173 of the Treaty: The person concerned must be able to establish, first, that the measure, although in the form of a regulation, in fact constitutes a decision, at least, in so far as he is concerned, secondly, that the measure is of direct concern to him and, thirdly, that the measure is of individual concern to him. The first and third conditions are not fulfilled in the case of an independent importer such as the applicant.With regard to the first condition, Regulation No 2761/81 displays all the characteristics of an orthodox regulation. It is of general application and is intended to be applied impersonally to objective situations of law and of fact, that is to say, to all imports into the territory of the Member States of products on which it imposes an antidumping duty.The imposition of an antidumping duty constitutes a legislative measure inasmuch as it affects the application of the Common Customs Tariff, which itself constitutes a legislative measure. For that reason the Council laid down the requirement in Article 13 (1) of the basic regulation, Regulation No 3017/79, that the imposition of that duty should be by regulation. The fact that the contested measure specifies certain details, such as the product in question or the name of the supplier, does not diminish the general application of the measure, and thus its status as a regulation.The Council next examines the case-law of the Court of Justice on the distinction between a regulation and a decision, in particular the judgments of 17 June 1980 (Joined Cases 789 and 790/79 Calpak [1980] ECR 1949) and of 26 February 1981 (Case 64/80 Giuffrida [1981] ECR 693). In the light of that case-law it considers that the contested measure has not only the form but also the character of a regulation for the following three reasons: First, the measure applies to all undertakings importing orthoxylene originating in Puerto Rico and the United States, that is to say a generalized and abstract category of undertakings, which is in fact indeterminate and indeterminable. Secondly, the measure introduced is not intended to apply to a specific person or to a determinable number of cases. Finally, the antidumping duty was imposed on the basis of an objective situation defined in relation to the purpose pursued by the regulation in question, which is to introduce measures of commercial policy intended to protect the Community industry against dumped products imported from nonmember countries.With regard to the third condition, namely that the measure must be of individual concern to the applicant, the Council claims that according to the case-law of the Court of Justice, in particular the judgment of 16 March 1978 (Case 123/77 UNICME [1978] ECR 845), that condition cannot be considered to be fulfilled unless the applicant proves that the contested measure concerns him by reason of characteristics which are peculiar to him or of a situation of fact which dinstinguishes him from all other persons. The only characteristic to which the applicant can point is that it falls within the category of importers of orthoxylene.In conclusion, the Council considers that Regulation No 2761/81 is of concern to the applicant solely because the latter belongs to a category objectively defined by specific measures applying to the product which it imports, that is to say, because of its status as an importer of orthoxylene. Any natural or legal person may pursue that activity, so that it is not of such a nature as to distinguish the applicant from all other persons.
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