NORDIC PROCUREMENT ENFORCEMENT
LEGAL RESEARCH PROJECT

CFIR-47 (Rules of Procedure)

Reply and rejoinder

EU Law

CFI (Rules of Procedure)

Article 47

1. The application initiating the proceedings and the defence may be supplemented by a reply from the applicant and by a rejoinder from the defendant unless the Court of First Instance, after hearing the Advocate General, decides that a second exchange of pleadings is unnecessary because the documents before it are sufficiently comprehensive to enable the parties to elaborate their pleas and arguments in the course of the oral procedure. However, the Court of First Instance may authorise the parties to supplement the documents if the applicant presents a reasoned request to that effect within two weeks from the notification of that decision.
2. The President shall fix the time-limits within which these pleadings are to be lodged.

EU Cases

Case	Pte	Ref	Text
T-125/06 Centro Studi Antonio Manieri	31-34	ECS-45 CFIR-43.6 CFIR-47.2-impl	31 The time-limit for lodging the reply was 10 October 2006. Since the reply was received at the Court Registry on 12 October 2006, it was lodged out of time. 32 The original reply was sent from Brussels by post on 6 October 2006. Although the original was sent only four days before the expiry of the time-limit by which it was to be lodged, the applicant failed to avail itself of the possibility provided for in Article 43(6) of the Rules of Procedure to send a copy of the signed original to the Registry by fax or by any other technical means of communication available to the Court of First Instance, which could have extended the time-limit for lodging the reply by an additional period of up to 10 days. 33 In the light of those circumstances, the applicant failed to demonstrate the diligence to be expected of a reasonably prudent applicant in order to comply with the time-limits. On the contrary, it increased the risk that the reply would be delivered to the Court out of time, first, by failing to draw the appropriate conclusions from the problems encountered in lodging the application and, second, by omitting to send a copy of the signed original to the Registry by fax or by any other technical means of communication available to the Court. 34 Such a lack of diligence rules out the existence of a case of force majeure and it is therefore necessary to reject the reply as inadmissible.