PURPOSE: to grant discharge to the Court of Justice for the financial year 2015.
NON-LEGISLATIVE ACT: Decision (EU) 2017/1616 of the European Parliament on discharge in respect of the implementation of the general budget of the European Union for the financial year 2015, Section IV — Court of Justice.
CONTENT: with the present decision, the European Parliament grants the Registrar of the Court of Justice discharge in respect of the implementation of the budget of the Court of Justice for the financial year 2015.
This decision is in line with the European Parliament's resolution adopted on 27 April 2017 and comprises a series of observations that form an integral part of the discharge decision (please refer to the summary of the opinion of 27 April 2017).
Amongst Parliament’s main observations in the resolution accompanying the discharge decision, it regretted that the Court of Justice's internal whistleblowing rules were adopted only in the beginning of 2016. It recommended that the Court of Justice disseminate those rules among its staff so that all employees are aware of them.
Parliament asked the Court of Justice to provide, by June 2017, details of the whistleblower cases in 2015, if any, and of how they were handled and finalised.
Moreover, stressing that transparency is a key element to the public trust, Parliament called on the Court of Justice to establish clear rules regarding ‘revolving doors’ and to put in place measures and dissuasive penalties, such as the reduction of pensions or the prohibition to work at least three years in similar bodies, to prevent ‘revolving doors’.