Contesting the Admissibility of the Action at First Instance

Abstract

This chapter describes how the Court of Justice (ECJ) has dealt with appeals in which the appellants contested the admissibility of the action at first instance. The difficulty was that the appellants did not always have a legal interest in bringing proceedings. The summary of the case-law differentiates between particular situations: where the General Court had rejected the preliminary plea of inadmissibility, where it had joined that plea to the substance and where the inadmissibility had not been challenged before the General Court. A number of rules specific to that question were added in the 2012 recast of the Rules of Procedure.