Judgment of the General Court of 14 July 2021 — Public.Resource.Org and Right to Know v Commission

(Case T-185/19) (1)

(Access to documents - Regulation (EC) No 1049/2001 - Harmonised standards - Documents concerning four harmonised standards approved by CEN - Refusal to grant access - Exception relating to the protection of the commercial interests of a third party - Protection deriving from copyright)

(2021/C 368/33)

Language of the case: English

Parties

Applicants: Public.Resource.Org, Inc., (Sebastopol, California, United States), Right to Know CLG (Dublin, Ireland) (represented by: F. Logue, Solicitor, A. Grünwald, J. Hackl and C. Nüßing, lawyers)

Defendant: European Commission (represented by: G. Gattinara, F. Thiran and S. Delaude, acting as Agents)

Intervener in support of the defendant: European Committee for Standardisation (CEN), and 14 other interveners, whose names are listed in the annex to the judgment (represented by: U. Karpenstein, K. Dingemann and M. Kottmann, lawyers)

Re:

Application on the basis of Article 263 TFEU for annulment of Commission Decision C(2019) 639 final of 22 January 2019 refusing to grant a request for access to four harmonised standards adopted by CEN.

Operative part of the judgment

The Court:

1.	Dismisses the action;

2.	Orders Public.Resource.Org, Inc. and Right to Know CLG to bear their own costs and to pay those incurred by the European Commission;

3.

Orders the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN), the Asociación Española de Normalización (UNE), the Asociaţia de Standardizare din România (ASRO), the Association française de normalisation (AFNOR), Austrian Standards International (ASI), the British Standards Institution (BSI), the Bureau de normalisation/Bureau voor Normalisatie (NBN), Dansk Standard (DS), the Deutsches Institut für Normung eV (DIN), the Koninklijk Nederlands Normalisatie Instituut (NEN), the Schweizerische Normen-Vereinigung (SNV), Standard Norge (SN), the Suomen Standardisoimisliitto ry (SFS), the Svenska institutet för standarder (SIS) and the Institut za standardizaciju Srbije (ISS) to bear their own costs.

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(1)  OJ C 172, 20.5.2019.