Judgment_paragraph 85 · Adib Mayaleh v Council of the European Union (T-307/12, T-408/13)

85It should be borne in mind that the purpose of the obligation to state the reasons for an act adversely affecting a person, as provided for in the second paragraph of Article 296 TFEU, is, first, to provide the person concerned with sufficient information to make it possible to determine whether the act is well founded or whether it is vitiated by an error permitting its validity to be contested before the Courts of the European Union and, second, to enable those Courts to review the lawfulness of the act. The obligation to state reasons thus imposed constitutes an essential principle of EU law which may be derogated from only for compelling reasons. The statement of reasons must therefore in principle be notified to the person concerned at the same time as the act adversely affecting him, for failure to state the reasons cannot be remedied by the fact that the person concerned learns the reasons for the act during the proceedings before the Courts of the European Union (see, to that effect, Case C-417/11 P Council v Bamba [2012] ECR, paragraph 49, and Case T-390/08 Bank Melli Iran v Council [2009] ECR II-3967, paragraph 80).