PURPOSE: to amend the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice of the European Communities as regards the language arrangements, 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 listed in Article 29(1) of the Rules of Procedure as the languages of a case.
In terms of Article 64 of the Statute of the Court of Justice, until the rules governing the language
arrangements applicable at the Court of Justice have been adopted in this Statute, all amendments to the provisions of the Rules of Procedure of the Court of Justice governing language arrangements must be made 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 to say by unanimous decision of the Council after consulting the European Parliament and the Commission.
The languages 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.