Health claims

Case T-296/12: notion of a “regulatory act”; exercise of implementing powers conferred to the Commission; a regulatory act to be challengeable must directly affect the legal situation of the applicant and, secondly, it must leave no discretion to its addressees, which are entrusted with the task of implementing it, such implementation being purely automatic and resulting from the contested legislation itself without the application of other intermediate rules; the principle of the unfettered evaluation of evidence; the probative value of a document; in so far as some of the applicants have brought a single action the admissibility of which is not in doubt, it is not necessary, for reasons of procedural economy, to examine the admissibility of the action as regards the other applicants; the question whether a regulatory act entails implementing measures should be assessed by reference to the position of the person pleading the right to bring proceedings and it is therefore irrelevant whether the act in question entails implementing measures with regard to other persons; in interpreting a provision of EU law, it is necessary to consider not only its wording but also the context in which it occurs and the objectives of the rules of which it is part; the Commission, according to art. 13(1) to (3) of Regulation 1924/2006, is entitled to adopt the list of permitted health claims in several stages; in the absence of a provision setting out either expressly or implicitly the consequences of failure to comply with procedural time limits, such a failure can entail the annulment, in whole or in part, of the measure to be adopted within the period in question only if it is shown that, had it not been for such an irregularity, the content of the measure might have been substantively different; the right to good administration includes, inter alia, the right of every person to be heard, before any individual measure which would affect him or her adversely is taken; however, the right to good administration does not cover the process of enacting measures of general application; the principle of equal treatment requires that comparable situations must not be treated differently and that different situations must not be treated in the same way unless such treatment is objectively justified; Regulation No 1924/2006 requires, first, that only health claims which have been scientifically proven may be used in the European Union and, second, that those claims are to be permitted only after a harmonised scientific evaluation by the EFSA meeting the highest possible standards.