Judgment_paragraph 106 · European Commission v Italian Republic (C-621/16 P)

106For the reasons set out in paragraphs 120 to 122 of the judgment under appeal, the General Court first rejected the Commission’s assertion that English, French and German were the main languages of the EU institutions’ deliberations, on the ground that it was ‘vague and general’. In that regard, it took the view, inter alia, that that assertion was neither corroborated by the language rules of the Court of Justice of the European Union nor by that of the European Parliament. It added, in substance, that, even assuming that the claim was correct, it could not be presumed, without further explanation, that a newly recruited official who is not fluent in any of the debating languages would not be capable of being immediately operational. Next, in paragraphs 123 to 126 of that judgment, the General Court rejected the relevance of the statistics put forward by the Commission in relation to documents translated by the Directorate-General for Translation of that institution, noting, in particular, that they did not make it possible to support the conclusion that those three languages are the languages most widely used in all the institutions. Similarly, in paragraphs 132 to 136 of the judgment, the General Court rejected the conclusions drawn by the Commission from a table drawn up by the latter setting out the languages most widely indicated as main languages by its officials and servants. On the one hand, it took the view that that table was intended only for Commission staff and, on the other, that the information concerning the main language of officials and other servants of the Commission did not, in any event, permit the proportion of the languages spoken by them to be established, since the latter must have satisfactory command of at least one other language, as required by Article 28(f) of the Staff Regulations. Finally, in paragraphs 141 to 144 of the judgment under appeal, the General Court rejected the statistics put forward by the Commission, according to which English, French and German are the foreign languages most studied and spoken in the European Union, on the grounds that it cannot be presumed that those statistics reflect the language skills of officials of the European Union and that, in any event, that fact was relevant only if the Commission had demonstrated that the restriction in question was in the interests of the service, which it had not done.