Court of First Instance, Art. 35 Rules of Procedure: inclusion of Bulgarian and Romanian among the languages of cases

PURPOSE: to amend the Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance of the European Communities with regard to languages, in order to include Bulgarian and Romanian among the languages of cases as laid down in the Rules of Procedure.

PROPOSED ACT: Council Decision.

CONTENT: on the accession of the Republic of Bulgaria and of Romania, Bulgarian and Romanian become official languages of the European Union. It is consequently proposed to add those languages to the list of languages of the case set out in Article 35(1) of the Rules of Procedure.

It follows from Article 64 of the Statute of the Court of Justice that until the rules governing the language arrangements applicable at the Court of Justice and the Court of First Instance have been adopted in the Statute, the provisions of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of First Instance concerning language arrangements may only be amended in accordance with the procedure laid down in the second paragraph of Article 245 of the EC Treaty and the second paragraph of Article 160 of the EAEC Treaty, that is by decision of the Council acting unanimously after consulting the European Parliament and the Commission.

The language of a case shall be Bulgarian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovene, Spanish or Swedish.