#62024TJ0229EU court rejects challenge over reserve list exclusion in EPSO competition
AI-generated summary for informational purposes only. Not legal advice. See the original source for the authoritative text.
The General Court upheld the EU Commission’s decision not to put Isabel Sánchez on the reserve list for an EPSO recruitment competition. The court said EPSO and the selection board were allowed to use score normalisation to even out differences between assessors, even though that method was not spelled out in the competition notice. It also found no breach of equal treatment, no unlawful EPSO вмешательство, and no failure to explain the result well enough to invalidate the decision. For EU recruitment teams and candidates, the practical message is that selection boards keep broad discretion to manage marking methods, including post-test normalisation, as long as the board remains in control and the process still supports equal treatment and consistent scoring. The applicant’s damages claims also failed because the main challenge to the non-inclusion decision was rejected.
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Key Changes
- EU selection boards may use score normalisation even if the competition notice did not mention it.
- EPSO can provide technical support on marking adjustments without taking over the selection board’s decision-making role.
- Candidates challenging reserve-list exclusion must show a real breach of equal treatment, reasoning, or procedure; this applicant did not.
Obligations
What this law requires
Selection boards may use score normalisation in recruitment competitions to neutralise differences in marker severity and support equal treatment, even though the judgment concludes that the competition notice did not have to state this method in advance.
When organizing competitions, EU institutions and agencies must ensure the procedure preserves equal treatment of candidates and objectivity in the choice made between them; the Court reiterates that judicial review is limited to that purpose.
The notice of competition must state the type of tests and how they are marked, but this judgment concludes that this disclosure requirement does not extend to making recourse to score normalisation public in advance.
Selection boards retain discretion to determine marking methods for the comparative stage of recruitment, provided they remain in control of the process and the method is applied uniformly to all candidates assessed under comparable conditions.
The recruitment process must support assessment on the basis of objective and uniform criteria; the judgment accepts that normalisation can satisfy this requirement by reducing variability between assessors.