With four rulings published on 7 July 2023, the Constitutional Court has decided on the constitutionality of how different groups of government officials are treated and the conditions and methods for their promotion.
Referred to by the administrative tribunal, the Constitutional Court had to rule on the constitutionality of the provisions relating to the on-call bonus and the military system bonus included in the law of 25 March 2015 in order to assess their compliance with the principle of equality before the law, insofar as they establish a difference in how police officers in different groups are treated.
Before referring the matter to the Constitutional Court, the administrative tribunal had carried out an initial analysis, concluding that “ on the face of it, there is no difference between groups C1 and B1 as far as the roles carried out [or] appointment to one or other of these groups is concerned […]” » and that « different treatment in terms of on-call and military system bonuses for different categories of officers who, on the face of it, are in comparable situations, could effectively constitute a breach of article 10bis of the Constitution ”.
However, in these rulings, the Constitutional Court judges that the aforementioned provisions are not contrary to article 10bis, paragraph 1stof the Constitution, which stipulates that the citizens of Luxembourg are equal before the law.
In arriving at this ruling, the Court judged that « the implementation of the constitutional rule of equality assumes that the categories of people between whom there is any alleged discrimination are in a comparable situation It adds that, within the context of public service, the principle of equal treatment naturally implies that government officials in a comparable situation are subject to the same rules and, in contrast, officials in different situations are governed by rules defined according to these differences.
The Court states that legislation aims to organise careers in view of the nature of the tasks required by each career and that, as a result, as the principle of equality is not the same as that of uniformity, it does not object to the freedom to organise and structure categories to be treated differently.
As a result, as public officials are classed in different groups and are therefore not in a comparable situation, no breach of the principle of equality has been established.
