During the course of the present procedure it is not necessary to decide whether and in what circumstances an intervener may claim a stay of execution, and it is sufficient to note that in judging whether the requests in question are well-founded it is not necessary to take into account the request of the land of baden-wurttemberg to intervene in case 8/58. The requests for a stay of execution have been lodged less than six weeks before 10 may 1960, the date on which the judgment on the substance is to be published. The applicants rely on the fact that the federal government has now resolved to execute the decisions of the high authority of 9 february 1958, as it has long been required to do, as appears from the judgment of the court of justice of 8 march 1960 in case 3/59. From the time when the abovementioned decisions were adopted the applicants could have expected them to be executed and as from that time they could have lodged a request for a stay of execution which might have been justified. In principle, it is for an applicant to decide whether it is appropriate to lodge a request for a stay of execution, and to decide at what stage of the procedure to lodge it. However, there are obvious objections to granting such a request when it is lodged after the written procedure has come to an end and after the oral procedure on the substance, at a time when the court has already commenced its deliberations on the judgment on the substance. Moreover, as the defendant has also observed, it is to be noted that the execution of the decisions of 9 february 1958 will not immediately provoke disadvantageous consequences for some undertakings and will result in only partial increases in rates for most of the other undertakings. It is true that that constitutes a disadvantage for the undertakings affected by those measures, but there would not appear to be any grounds for the argument put forward by the applicants that these alterations in rates could not be withdrawn at a later stage. The foregoing considerations require that the request be rejected, and it is not necessary to order the measures of inquiry proposed by the applicants.
Citations:
C-3/58
European
Updated: 10 April 2022; Ref: scu.131577