Judgment No. 3510
Decision
1. The EPO shall pay the complainant 1,000 euros in compensation for the injury caused by the slowness of the internal appeal proceedings.
2. All other claims are dismissed.
Summary
The complainant objects to the excessive length of the process of obtaining a visa for his wife’s adopted daughter.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
complaint allowed; reasonable time; visa; duty of care
Consideration 9
Extract:
"The forms and methods of approaching the authorities of the host country of an international organisation are a matter for the discretion of the executive body of that organisation, which is free to choose what it regards as the most appropriate course of action."
Keywords
host state
Considerations 24-26
Extract:
"According to the Tribunal’s case law, a staff member who files an appeal is entitled to expect a decision to be taken within a reasonable time. Since an internal appeal is a necessary prelude to judicial review, the organisation too must respect the need for expeditious proceedings (see, for example, Judgment 2116, under 11).
In the present case, the defendant organisation does not dispute the length of the internal appeal proceedings which, it says, was due to the workload of the appeal body and the complexity of the case.
While the Tribunal can accept that the complexity of the case might have occasioned some delay in processing the internal appeal, the same is not true of the workload. The above-mentioned requirement of expeditious proceedings means that the Organisation must ensure that it has the resources to deal with internal appeals within a reasonable period of time, in accordance with the case law [...]."
Reference(s)
ILOAT Judgment(s): 2116
Keywords
delay; internal procedure
| 
