17The Court of First Instance also considered whether Article 115(3) of Regulation No 40/94 contravened the principle of nondiscrimination. In that regard it held as follows:60 As regards the obligation on an applicant for registration of a Community trade mark under Article 115(3) of Regulation No 40/94 and Rule 1(1)(j) of Article 1 of Regulation No 2868/95 to “indicate a second language which shall be a language of the Office the use of which he accepts as a possible language of proceedings for opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings”, it is clear that, contrary to the claims of the applicant and the Greek Government, this does not involve an infringement of the principle of nondiscrimination.61 First, it is apparent from the actual wording of Article 115(3) of Regulation No 40/94 that, by indicating a second language, the applicant accepts use of that language as a language of proceedings only in relation to opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings. It follows, as indeed is confirmed by the first sentence of Article 115(4) of Regulation No 40/94, that so long as the applicant is the sole party to proceedings before the Office, the language used for filing the application for registration remains the language of proceedings. Consequently, in such proceedings, Regulation No 40/94 cannot be taken, in itself, as in any sense implying differentiated treatment as regards language, given that it in fact guarantees use of the language of the application filed as the language of proceedings and thus the language in which procedural documents of a decisional character must be drafted.62 Next, in so far as Article 115(3) of Regulation No 40/94 requires the applicant to indicate a second language for the purposes of the possible use of that language as the language of proceedings for opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings, the fact remains that that rule was adopted for the legitimate purpose of reaching a solution on languages in cases where opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings ensue between parties who do not have the same language preference and cannot agree between themselves on the language of proceedings. In that regard, it is to be noted that, under Article 115(7) of Regulation No 40/94, parties to opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings are entitled to agree that any one of the official languages of the European Community is to be the language of the proceedings, an option which might particularly suit parties with the same language preference.63 In pursuing the objective of determining the language of the proceedings where parties who do not share the same language preference fail to agree, the Council must be considered to have made an appropriate and proportionate choice, even if the official languages of the Community were treated differently. First of all, Article 115(3) of Regulation No 40/94 accords the applicant for registration of a trade mark an opportunity to fix, from among the most widely known languages in the European Community, the language that is to be used for opposition, revocation or invalidity proceedings in the event that the first language chosen by the applicant is not that requested by another party to the proceedings. Secondly, by limiting that choice to the languages which are the most widely known in the European Community, and thus avoiding the possibility of the language of proceedings being particularly remote in relation to the linguistic knowledge of the other party to the proceedings, the Council remained within the limits of what is necessary for achieving the aim in view (Cases 222/84 Johnston [1986] ECR 1651, paragraph 38, and C-285/98 Kreil [2000] ECR I-69, paragraph 23).64 Finally, the applicant and the Greek Government are not entitled to rely on the paragraph added by the Amsterdam Treaty to Article 8d of the [EC] Treaty (now, after amendment, Article 21 EC) according to which “every citizen of the Union may write to any of the institutions or bodies referred to in this Article or in Article 7 [EC] in one of the languages mentioned in Article 314 [EC] and have an answer in the same language”. Article 21 EC refers to the Parliament and the Ombudsman and Article 7 EC mentions the Parliament, the Council, the Commission, the Court of Justice and the Court of Auditors and also the Economic and Social Council and the Committee of the Regions. In so far as the paragraph in question is applicable ratione temporis to this case, the Office is in any event not one of the institutions or bodies referred to in Article 7 EC or Article 21 EC.’
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