Judgment No. 4470
Decision
The complaint is dismissed.
Summary
The complainant impugns Eurocontrol’s decision to stop payment, as from 1 August 2016, of the education allowance and the dependent child allowance which he was receiving in respect of his daughter.
Judgment keywords
Keywords
family allowance; dependent child; complaint dismissed
Consideration 3
Extract:
[T]he Tribunal fails to see how the timeframe within which the Joint Committee for Disputes met and issued its opinion of itself renders that opinion and the subsequent decision unlawful. Although Article 4 of [...] Office Notice No. 06/11 of 7 March 2011 provides that the Committee should “preferably” give a reasoned opinion within “sixty days subsequent to the receipt of the request for an opinion”, this requirement is not absolute and failure to comply with this timeframe only means that the Director General of Eurocontrol may take his or her decision without receiving the Committee’s opinion. Similarly, the second subparagraph of Article 92(2) of the Staff Regulations governing officials of the Eurocontrol Agency provides, first, that the Director General is to notify the person concerned of her or his reasoned decision “within four months from the date on which the [internal] complaint was lodged” and, second, that “[i]f at the end of that period no reply to the complaint has been received, this shall be deemed to constitute an implied decision rejecting it, against which an appeal may be lodged [with the Tribunal]”. Furthermore, the fact that over one year passed before an express decision was adopted on the complainant’s internal complaint, even if that delay is considered unreasonable, cannot, of itself, have adversely affected his right of effective appeal to the Tribunal: first, he successfully filed this complaint and his entitlements would be fully restored if the Tribunal were to allow it; second, under Article VII, paragraph 3, of the Statute of the Tribunal, if he had wished, he could have filed a complaint against Eurocontrol’s implicit decision earlier on account of the failure to reply to the internal complaint that he lodged on 18 October 2016.
Keywords
administrative delay; direct appeal to tribunal; delay in internal procedure
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