EU Law Blog has an interesting post about this case, which more or less says anyone can get an administrative decision reopened and changed following a subsequent ECJ judgment that shows it’s wrong: the only limit is that member states can lay down reasonable time limits for applying for a reopening, in the interests of legal certainty, so long as they are not liable to render practically impossible or excessively difficult the exercise of rights conferred by Community law – in other words that they do not make the interested person’s legal remedy ineffective.
Interesting, this, if lawyers here try to use it creatively. Does it means, say, that a pharmaceuticals firm turned down a marketing authorisation by the MHRA on the basis of the current ECJ case law (say on balancing the rights of innovator firms against generic manufacturers) could, if the balance shifted in later cases, come back and judicially review the refusal even years later? If the normal judicial review time limit was seen as a bar, would that satisfy the effectiveness test?
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