Change in the Locus Standi Rules in an Action for Annulment of Research Paper

Change in the Locus Standi Rules in an Action for Annulment of Community Measures - Research Paper Example On the basis of Article 230 EC, individuals and other private parties will always retain the jurisdiction to challenge decisions addressed to them. As far as the claims of Jacques St Malo, Pierre St Michel, and Sainsbury's Supermarkets are concerned they will be subject to the limitation of this principle which is the personal interest principle. Furthermore this "personal interest" will only be held to exist where the annulment of the act can produce legal effects for these applicants.1 Private parties do not have the standing to act in the interest of the law or of the Community in general. Private parties like the ones mentioned above, therefore, can also challenge decisions addressed to other persons, as well as regulations or other general legislative acts. However, they can only do this when they can show that these are of 'direct and individual concern' to them. The Court of Justice has interpreted the concept of 'direct concern' to mean that a direct causality must exist between the act that is challenged and the legal situation of the individual challenging that act.4 A measure will be of direct concern if it affects th e legal position of the defendant/applicant directly and leaves no discretion to the addressees of the measure who are responsible for its implementation. Such an implementation has to be automatic and a result of Community rules without the application of other intermediate rules. For determining individual concern, the case Plaumann v. Commission7was a seminal one and gave judicial review a rather restricted application in the Court of Justice8 where the court defined applicants as individually concerned if the decision or act "'affects them by reason of certain attributes which are peculiar to them or by reason of circumstances in which they are differentiated from all other persons and by virtue of these factors distinguishes them individually (para 107)