WORKING CONDITIONS : COURT RULES ON RELEVANCE OF LENGTH OF SERVICE.

• Position: Brief article

The length of service of a fixed-term civil servant wishing to be promoted to a career role must be taken into account when both roles are of a comparable nature and no objective reason justifies treating them differently. Thus ruled the EU Court of Justice, on 8 September, in answer to a question referred for a preliminary ruling by the Spanish jurisdiction(1). Judges were called upon to rule on the interpretation of Directive 1999/70/EEC, whose aim is to put into effect the framework agreement on fixed-term work, in view of the litigation opposing the Spanish regional administration and one of its civil servants. Francisco Javier Rosado Santana worked between 1989 and 2005 as an interim civil servant with the Autonomous Community of Andalusia in Spain. He became a career civil servant with the same regional administrative authority in 2005.

In 2007, he passed a selective competition for the internal promotion of career civil servants. Yet the competition was only open to...