Subject matter: Civil Service Law – requalification process for public service workers – causes for dismissal. Keywords: Public administration; Pursuit of the public interest; Principle of a minimum continuity in the legal system; Principle of trust; Norms that restrict constitutional rights, freedoms and guarantees; Right to job security; Termination of a public employment relationship; Prohibition on dismissal without just cause; Turning a public employment relationship into a labour relationship; Rationalisation of staff numbers. |
RULING No. 474/13
29 of August of 2013
Headnotes:
The public legal employment relationship is encompassed by both the protection which the Constitution affords to the right to job security and the prohibition on dismissal without just cause, both of which also cover dismissal for objective reasons, which is also admissible in this field of action. Although, when compared to its private counterpart, the public employment relationship is especially stable and lasting, there are no constitutional grounds for saying that the public labour bond should be a lifelong one. Like the other fundamental rights, the right to security of public employment is open to limits and restrictions in the light of other constitutionally protected rights and values.
The questions of constitutionality addressed in this Ruling centred on the legislator’s decision to widen the grounds on which the contractual public employment bond could be terminated for objective reasons. They particularly entailed judging the compatibility of that termination with the constitutional concept of just cause, and with the test of proportionality in the light of which all norms that restrict constitutional rights, freedoms and guarantees must be assessed; and they also involved the issue of whether these broader reasons for terminating the contractual bond could be applied to workers for whom a labour bond based on a definitive appointment was converted into a contractual bond by a law passed in 2008.
The grounds for the decision to begin the so-called “requalification process”, which changes the worker’s status to inactive – a situation that ends with the termination of the public employment relationship if the worker is unable to secure his/her reassignment to another position – were the need to reduce the budget of the organ, department or service in question because of a fall in the transfers of funds it receives from the state and/or in its own income.
No provision was made for reasons of a general nature that would be independent of the organ, department or service’s potential or actual performance in fulfilling those of its competences and responsibilities that are linked to the pursuit of the public interest, or for reasons involving some dysfunctionality of the entity, particularly on the human resource level (and one must remember that personnel costs are only one of the various headings in a budget). Nor did the norm before the Court provide for any control based on an evaluation of the worker him/herself, before the decision to make him/her inactive
It is the state’s responsibility to include precise decision-making criteria in the laws it makes, in such a way as to limit the Public Administration to an area of action in which it is bound by rules and cannot just do as it pleases. Laws must identify a core set of reasons that constitute the grounds for an intervention in which a given constitutional right, freedom and guarantee is restricted. There must also be provision for the possibility of a judicial control of any lack of criteria for managing the intervention, and of whether the latter’s consequences are proportional – consequences which, in the present case, include the substantial damage to the right to job security which the norm was capable of causing.
The Court said that the system introduced by the Decree of the Assembly of the Republic norms before it for analysis in this prior review case entailed an insurmountable margin for decision-making within which it was not possible to determine the adequacy of the reasons for taking decisions that would restrict constitutional rights, freedoms and guarantees.
Turning to the norm that required the application of the new regime to all workers – even those who, from 2008 onwards, had transitioned from a permanent appointment regime to one involving open-ended labour contracts – the Court was of the view that the norm unconstitutionally violated the principle of trust, given the existence of expectations that had been legitimately created, particularly by the legislator’s own actions.
Nor was it able to find any justification for the norm in the argument that the legislator was seeking to progress the process of standardising legal labour relations. Uniformity of this kind is not a value in its own right, nor does it contain – be it in the public or the private regime – grounds for saying that it would be in the public interest to subordinate the protection of legitimate trust and discontinue the state’s previous policy of not changing key elements of workers’ statuses, which are elements that constitute part of the identity of the labour relationship. Within a framework as vast and complex as the Public Administration, it is difficult to imagine that it would no longer be possible for there to be workers performing the same tasks, but with employment bonds that are not entirely the same – a situation that also arises in private legal employment relationships.
The Court said it found insufficient grounds for considering that there were justifiable public-interest reasons for violating the protection due to the legitimate trust that there will be continuity in the state’s behaviour with regard to the core element in the labour-law status of the workers covered by the norm. As such, the revocatory norm in question was in breach of the requirement that the Law be predictable, in the sense that people must be able to rely on the predictability of the Law when they plan their lives, and the norm thus violated the elements of trust and legal security that are inherent in the principle of a state based on the rule of law, which is enshrined in the Constitution.
The Court therefore held the norms it was reviewing to be unconstitutional.
Summary:
These prior review proceedings were requested by the President of the Republic and involved norms contained in a Decree of the Assembly of the Republic.
The first question of constitutionality addressed a norm that added three new reasons of an objective nature for terminating the public legal employment relationship to the regime governing workers with a public employment relationship.
The second question was directed at the scope of the subjective application of the new regime, which the legislator also sought to apply to the workers encompassed by a norm contained in the 2008 “Law establishing the regimes governing the labour bond, careers and remunerations of workers who exercise public functions”. This 2008 norm safeguarded subjects in a public employment relationship whose status was derived from the fact that, at the moment when the 2008 Law entered into force, they possessed a bond produced by an earlier definitive appointment, but now passed ope legis to a contractual bond. In other words, in 2013 the legislator wanted to do away with the safeguard clause created in 2008.
The safeguard took the shape of the maintenance of two essential component elements of the workers’ earlier status: the regime governing the termination of the labour relationship; and that governing reorganisations and the placement of workers in a “special mobility” situation.
The 2008 Law did away with the notions of public “functionary” or servant and “administrative agent” (which became mere conceptual definitions), and with “appointment” as the standard regime governing the formation of the public employment relationship, which it replaced with the labour contract. This represented a step forward in the movement to turn the public employment relationship into a labour relationship, albeit still a specific form of the latter that only applies in the Public Administration.
The current legislation says that the procedure for rationalising staff rosters and placing workers in a special mobility situation can only occur as the result of a decision taken on the basis of a prior evaluation and for specific reasons, and it must be shown that the existing staff do not match the department or service’s needs. This reasoning can also be based on conclusions and recommendations in audit reports or organisational assessment studies. For departments or services to be merged or restructured, a legislative act must set general, abstract criteria for selecting the staff needed for the organisational unit to pursue its responsibilities or exercise its competences.
The Public Administration possesses various instruments designed to enable it to rationally organise and allocate workers who perform public functions, either as part of a reforming intervention, or for imperative reasons linked to a need to correct a functional mismatch of human resources. Such actions can involve far-reaching changes in the public legal employment relationship, on the level of both its subjects (with a change in the public entity that is the employer) and its object (removal from an existing job, initial placement on inactive status, and subsequent reallocation to another position).
2008 also saw the publication of the Regime governing the Labour Contract for Public Functions (RCTFP), which moved even more evidently closer to the Labour Code regime.
This Regime admitted the generalised use of the open-ended labour contract for activities that do not imply the exercise of powers of authority or of functions which pertain to sovereignty. It reserved the formation of an appointment-based bond to workers whose career is directly linked to the exercise of public-authority or sovereign powers – i.e. to those which have been called “hard core” public functions. Outside these domains, public employers can now use the labour contract to form a labour relationship.
This means that the Public Administration now uses labour bonds that until 2008 had been specifically reserved to the private labour contract – bonds that do not turn the respective workers into public servants or administrative agents of the state. The new legislation opened the way to replacing the figure of the “public functionary” (afforded by the appointment regime) and accentuated the tendency to bring the public employment relationship and the private labour regime closer together – a dynamic in which it had been clear for some time that the two regimes were intersecting with one another. Provision was made for objective reasons for terminating a labour contract, in a move that had been suggested for some time as necessary in order to combat an exaggerated sense of stability. Dismissal on the grounds that the employer has experienced a reduction in its level of activity is now possible, either in the form of a collective dismissal, or in that of the elimination of a specific position. When the activities of a public legal person are partially curtailed by law, it can now conduct a collective dismissal or abolish one or more particular jobs, for reasons involving the need for economy, efficacy and efficiency in the pursuit of its responsibilities.
The Decree of the Assembly of the Republic containing the norms that were brought to the attention of the Constitutional Court in the present case covered all the organs, departments and services belonging to the state’s direct and indirect administration, public higher education institutions, local authority departments and services, and the organs, departments and services of the administration of the autonomous regions (the rules were adapted to the latter by a specific piece of legislation).
The subjective scope of the Decree’s applicability encompasses all workers who exercise public functions, regardless of the format in which the public employment bond under which they perform them was constituted, including workers covered by regimes contained in special laws. The list of possible grounds for the decision to initiate a requalification process was expanded to include three new ones: i) a reduction in the organ, department or service’s budget as a result of a decrease in the transfers it receives from the State Budget, and/or in its own income; ii) the need to requalify its workers, in order to bring them into line with its responsibilities or objectives; and iii) in order to comply with the strategy defined for it.
The regime applicable to workers in a requalification situation is a complex one.
In the case of workers with a contractual status, 12 months after a person has been placed in a requalification situation and if he/she has not restarted work under an indefinite contract in any organ, department or service in the meantime, the requalification process ends and the final act takes the form of the termination of the person’s labour contract for public functions.
As soon as he/she is placed in the requalification situation, the worker’s pay is cut to 66.7% of his/her base remuneration for the first six months, and then to 50% after that.
On the level of the worker’s duties, besides those that are inherent in the condition of any worker performing public functions, the Decree would have made it obligatory to take part in competitive appointment processes for open positions whose category is at least that of his/her original one and comply with the pertinent functional mobility rules, to attend vocational training actions, and to agree to start working again, subject to certain conditions.
The Decree also established a number of serious offences punishable by dismissal, including unjustified failure to attend training actions, and refusal to start working again without due grounds for doing so.
The Court pointed out that it was already possible for the public employment relationship to be terminated for objective reasons in the case of workers whose labour bond was formed under a contract for an indefinite period of time, particularly as a consequence of the reorganisation of the respective department or service and as part of a collective dismissal process or dismissal on the grounds that the worker’s position has been eliminated.
In his request to the Court, the President of the Republic did not ask whether the termination of a public-labour-law relationship for objective reasons that cannot be attributed to either of the subjects is compatible with the Constitution. Existing constitutional jurisprudence in the field of employability in public functions already accepts that it is.
The question of constitutionality here is instead centred on the three new substantial grounds for dismissal for objective reasons. The Constitution enshrines the right to job security, which includes a negative right in the form of the prohibition on dismissal without just cause or for political or ideological reasons. For the requirement of just cause to be fulfilled, constitutional jurisprudence accepts that a labour relationship can be terminated for objective causes, as well as for those for which the subjects themselves can be said to be responsible, on condition that they make it impossible in practical terms for the labour bond to continue.
The constitutional prohibition on dismissal without just cause is designed to defend employment and prevent arbitrary dismissal. The requisites for the cause of the end of a labour relationship for objective reasons to be valid are equally as demanding as those applicable to dismissals for subjective just cause. The guarantee applicable to employment conditions the admissibility of dismissals for objective reasons, and the state is required to ensure the fulfilment of two preconditions: a) there must be one or more situations for which the employer itself is not responsible and whose nature means that it cannot be required to continue the labour relationship; and b) the worker must be adequately compensated for the end of the labour relationship as the result of a fact for which he/she is not responsible.
In its previous jurisprudence the Court has already said that dismissal of workers ope legis directly conflicts with the right to job security. The state is not free to dismiss its staff except by means of processes that are accepted by the Constitution. The Court has also already decided that the abolition or reformulation of state departments, services or bodies cannot in its own right constitute sufficient reason for the public servants in question to be dismissed with complete freedom. Any reorganisation of the Public Administration must always take account of the constitutional principles and rules that enshrine and guarantee the rights of public servants.
There may be situations in which the abolition or reorganisation of Public Administration departments, services or bodies makes it impossible to keep a member of staff in the concrete position he/she currently occupies. It may be necessary to adopt solutions that lead to a change in the professional conditions under which public servants performs their tasks. However, the changes in rules governing the status of workers which the legislator wanted to make in the name of the public interest pursued by the Administration and which would have affected the conditions under which public servants perform their professional duties, because they might have led to a compression of their rights, must be subordinated to the limits the Constitution places on restrictions of workers’ rights, freedoms and guarantees. Any compression of the constitutional guarantee of job security must be necessary, suitable and proportional and must respect the essential core of the corresponding right to job security.
The Court has also expressly stated in earlier jurisprudence that the regime governing labour bonds, pay and careers in the Public Administration can restrict job security when the intention is to ensure the quality of public administrative work. Job security is a constitutional imperative, but so is the good administration model inherent in the pursuit of the “public interest” – an interest that public servants are precisely required to serve to the exclusion of all others.
Except for one ruling, all the earlier constitutional jurisprudence looks at modifications in the public legal employment relationship and its conformity with the worker’s fundamental right to job security, but does not address the normative dimension of the termination of the public labour bond.
The issue that is at stake in the present Ruling – that of the degree of compression of the public legal employment relationship in the statute in question – arises in relation to the dimension ‘loss of employment as a result of dismissal’.
The Court took the view that the principle that laws must be precise is not a constitutional parameter a se – i.e. when taken in isolation from the nature of the subject matter in question or without being conjugated with other constitutional principles that are relevant to the concrete case. Portuguese constitutional law does not include a general prohibition on the issue of laws that contain indeterminate concepts. However, there are areas in which the Constitution expressly requires laws not to be indeterminate, such as the requirements for ‘typicity’ (that laws must adequately typify crimes) in penal and fiscal matters. The Court said that, more than the issue of indeterminability in its own right, the question here is whether the legislator respected the need for the accuracy and clarity which the Constitution requires the causes of dismissals for objective reasons to possess. In analysing this question, one must assess whether the substantial compression of the right to job security, seen as a restriction on restrictions, remains within the bounds of the need for proportionality demanded by the Constitution – i.e. whether it limits itself to that which is necessary in order to safeguard other constitutionally protected rights or interests.
As the Court had already said in past rulings, the question of the relevance of the principle that laws must be precise or determinable goes hand in hand with the principle that certain questions can only be decided by law and only the legislator can legislate, and from there leads on to the need to know in each specific case whether or not the scope of the norms provided for in a given law fulfils the requisites that are indispensable to the ability to say that their content does not leave a decision-making sphere to the Public Administration, as executor of the law, that includes essential elements which ought to be set out in the law itself. If this is not the case – if the Administration is left to decide matters that ought to have been determined by the legislator – then one would be in the presence of a subversion of the order under which some competences pertain to the legislator and some to the entity that applies the law.
In the light of the special regime to which restrictions on constitutional rights, freedoms and guarantees are subject, the legislator must furnish the Administration with rules of conduct which include criteria that safeguard the essential core of the guarantee of those rights and interests of private individuals to which the Constitution affords its protection. The legislator must do this by defining the scope of the content of the precept it is creating, and must do so in a way that allows the courts to exercise an effective objective control over whether the concrete actions of the Administration are appropriate or not.
The Constitutional Court was of the opinion that, as they stood, the norms before it did not allow the courts tasked with deciding ensuing conflicts to control whether the Public Administration acted legally when it ordered the beginning of a requalification process. The norms did not contain safe criteria for taking decisions. The decision to restrict an entity’s budget was especially removed from judicial control, because it was of a political nature, and yet conditioned and determined the whole downstream decision-making chain, which would thus have been bound by a pre-existing fact.
The Court said that the budgetary factor that already exists in current legislation must certainly be the object of specific consideration, but making it one of the valuation criteria that must be weighed up is not the same thing as adopting it as an entirely open criterion for rationalising staff numbers and subsequently terminating public legal employment relationships.
The norms attached additional weight to budget-based reasons for decisions, but did not simultaneously provide criteria that would make it possible to understand and control whether those reasons are being adequately balanced against the affected workers’ right to job security.
In the private sector, workers cannot be fired on the grounds that their positions have been eliminated – be it in the collective dismissal format, or in that of dismissal because specific jobs have been abolished – due solely to a reduction in the employer’s income, either because transfers from outside (e.g. between units in complex business organisations) have decreased, or because the employer’s own revenues have fallen. In order to use these instruments, private employers must show that something has occurred on a general level – reasons linked to the market or to structural or technological factors. These reasons must represent an adequate cause for the desired dismissal, and must constitute a fair and appropriate response to it.
Another norm whose constitutionality was under review in the present case concerned the application of the new requalification regime to public servants who, when the law on the regimes governing the labour bond, careers and remunerations of workers who exercise public functions came into force, saw their public-employment relationship converted into a contractual one. As we have already seen, however, these workers were attributed a mixed status, because the legislator wanted to safeguard their specific labour-law status, the main distinguishing element of which is the regime governing termination of their employment relationship. This safeguard norm would have been eliminated by the new norms before the Court.
The Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence on the principle of trust has been firmly established primarily in cases in which the Court was called on to control the constitutional conformity of retrospective norms. This principle postulates the idea that the trust which citizens and the community have in the protection of the law and the actions of the state must itself be protected, and this in turn implies a minimum degree of certainty and legal security in relation to people’s rights and their legally created expectations. Having said this, this principle does not annul the democratically legitimated legislator’s freedom to both shape and revise legislation, so there is no right to the non-frustration of legal expectations or to the maintenance of a given regime, either with regard to lasting legal relations or when it comes to complex facts that have already partly occurred or been partially completed.
The Constitutional Court restated its position that the legislator possesses the freedom to shape the public service regime in such a way as to adapt it to the public-interest needs that are experienced at any given moment in time.
However, although there is a movement to bring the public service bond and the employment bond pertaining to private workers closer to one another, this trend has maintained the specificity of the public service bond with regard to the termination, for objective reasons not linked to their behaviour, of the labour relationship of workers who had acquired that bond based on their definitive appointment in the past.
All the legislation that preceded the norm that was analysed in this case has contained a norm safeguarding workers whose public labour bond was originally derived from a
definitive appointment, but was changed to a contractual one ope legis, from the possible causes of a termination of their public employment relationship applicable in the latter situation (and the minutes of the preparatory work for the earlier legislation confirm that this was always the intention). It is safe to say that the workers who were the object of the safeguard norm formed expectations based on a behaviour that was positively demonstrated by the state, such that they thought they could count on the continuity of their status with regard to the possible objective causes of termination of the public employment relationship, and that they could only be dismissed under the terms permitted by the status corresponding to the bond created by a definitive appointment.
This framework of a solid expectation which, as we have already seen, was based on a positive behaviour on the part of the state, came up against a combination of a worsening of the state’s economic/financial difficulties and the commitments made as a result of the Economic Adjustment Programme for Portugal. The state subjected these workers, along with virtually all the others who were paid from public funds, to pay-cutting measures in 2011, 2012, and 2013. The justification given for these pay cuts was the greater job stability enjoyed by these workers, compared to their counterparts who were subject to the Labour Code, and above all that the causes that would have permitted the termination of their labour relationship for objective reasons were not applicable to them, so their pay was cut instead.
Taken together, all these factors created an especially strong expectation that the exceptional regime would continue to exist.
There were good underlying reasons for this expectation. The workers’ conviction was rooted in the heart of the bond that tied them to their public employer, on top of which the state had only recently sent them multiple clear signals of the continuing validity of the material reasons that linked them to (or at least did not justify any differentiation from) workers like them, who, at the moment when the paradigm changed, benefited from the appointment regime.
The centrality that keeping his/her job possesses for any worker undoubtedly affected the life choices made by the group of workers in question. It is difficult to find a higher degree of personal investment than the one that seeks to preserve one’s job – a value
that is essential to both personal self-fulfilment and ensuring the conditions needed to provide for oneself and one’s family. The constitutional prohibition on dismissal without just cause does not only protect the worker from things that would otherwise profoundly affect his/her life; it also obeys an order of collective values, in the sense that it is designed to minimise or greatly reduce the frequency of situations in which people lose their jobs and this loss has highly damaging social consequences.
There is no contradiction between the need to weigh up the efficiency and efficacy of the Public Administration on the one hand and the requirement to respect private individuals’ rights and guarantees on the other. Both the principle that the state must pursue the public interest and that derived from the principle of good administration also call on values and parameters that lie outside the legal sphere and include the principles of good management and economic/financial rationality, none of which does away with the primacy of legality.
Respect for the rights of private individuals must be seen as one of the dimensions of good administration in a democratic state based on the rule of law. This means that an administration is not good if, although it may be effective in the pursuit of its goals, it does so without fulfilling the requirements imposed on it by the legal order, particularly those derived from the duty to respect individuals’ rights and interests.
The Court said that the legislator had to demonstrate on the levels of adequacy, necessity and just measure that its far-reaching and non-transitional intervention responded to needs of the Public Administration, especially in the light of the command derived from the constitutional norm that requires the Administration to pursue the public interest while respecting citizens’ legally protected rights and interests.
The Court was unable to find grounds that would have enabled it to consider that there were public-interest reasons whose importance made them prevail over the trust generated by the legitimate and positively reinforced expectation that the workers in question here would be protected from the possibility of dismissal without subjective just cause.
Nor did it see any justification for harming the expectation, which the legislator itself had greatly enhanced, that there would be formal equality between the workers affected by this norm and those who, since 1 January 2009, have been subject to the regime governing labour contracts for public functions.
Supplementary information:
The Ruling was the object of one concurring and one dissenting opinion with regard to the first of the questions of constitutionality. The concurring Justice agreed with the interpretation of the Court’s jurisprudence under which,
in cases of doubt, one must presume that the ordinary legislator’s solutions for regulating a given sector of collective life are in conformity with the Constitution. However, she emphasised that not only is the Constitution itself bound in relation to certain points derived from its own norms, but it is also subject to constitutional principles such as those of the continuity of the legal order and the prohibition on arbitrary forms of public behaviour.
She said that the principle affected by one of the norms in the present case was that of the continuity of the legal order. If, in 2008, the legislator decided to transform the bond governing the majority of public servants into a public employment relationship governed by the contractual canons of labour law, and did so while safeguarding the continued existence of the framework of stability with regard to the regime governing the termination of labour contracts; if, in 2010, 2011 and 2012, the same legislator affected some of the rights and pay of the people encompassed by the modification undertaken in 2008, precisely on the grounds that doing so preserved the stability of the labour relationship; then in 2013, if it wanted to put an end to that stability by changing its earlier decision and denying the grounds it had invoked one and two years before in order to justify affecting people’s rights, the legal order that would be the stage for all of this would suffer disruptions and discontinuities which, quite apart from anything else, would undermine the objective dimension of trust and security, in their role as central elements of a state based on the rule of law. In taking its decision the legislator was therefore under a special burden to justify why it opted to cause that disruption – and it failed to do so. In the present case the burden of justification meant: clearly demonstrating that the measure was essential to containing public debt; clearly demonstrating that the measure was essential to resolving the Republic’s economic/financial emergency; and clearly demonstrating that the measure was essential to the rationalisation of the Public Administration, in a strategic vision of a reform of the organisational structure of the state. In the view of the concurring Justice, the state failed to demonstrate any of these things.
Nor did it demonstrate that, for the same reasons – and thus in pursuit of immediate and mediate imperatives linked to the sustainability of the state – it was necessary for the Public Administration to engage in arbitrary forms of behaviour in the shape of dismissals ad nutum.
The constitutional guarantee of job security is not specific to the Portuguese Constitution. If one looks at the articles in certain European charters of rights, which the Ruling quotes, one sees that this is a principle that is common to the various European states.
That which is at stake here is the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of an employment that one has legitimately obtained and is the means of providing for one’s own and one’s family’s livelihood. Application of this guarantee (which, like the principle of a minimum degree of continuity in the legal order, is a constitutional principle that is shared by the states of Europe) to employment in the public sector entails certain specificities. It is one thing to admit restrictions on the right to job security when what is at stake – as is the case in private-law labour relations – is private economic initiative, in its place as a constitutional value that legitimates such a restriction; it is something else altogether to admit restrictions on this guarantee when the question involves – and this is the situation in public-sector labour relations – the good functioning of the state, when offered as a reason and grounds for the restriction. Above all in circumstances – like the ones surrounding the question that was put to the Court in the present case – in which the good functioning of the state requires a restructuring of the Public Administration, one cannot deny the particular weight and intensity of the constitutional values that would serve to justify restriction of the right to job security. There is no such thing as a constitutional order that can continue to exist if the state is not sustainable, just as there is no such thing as a constitution that rationally chooses the irresponsibility (or indifference) of the current generation towards the autonomy of future generations as a principle with which to guide public order. But, and once again, the simple fact is that in order to legitimate arbitrary behaviour by the Administration in dismissing its own “workers”, it would be necessary for there to be a clear demonstration that the measure was essential to the pursuit of that principle of the sustainability of the state. The concurring Justice was of the opinion that it was the ordinary legislator’s responsibility to demonstrate that essential nature, and that the absence of such a demonstration meant that she should vote in favour of the norms’ unconstitutionality.
Cross-references:
Rulings nos. 154/10 (20-04-2010); 4/03 (07-01-2003); 683/99 (21-12-1999); 233/97 (12-03-1997); 340/92 (28-10-1992); 285/92 (22-07-1992); 64/91 (04-04-1991); and 154/86 (6-05-1986).