Complaints about proposal rejection

If you believe that your proposal rejection was based on a flaw in the selection procedure, you can submit a complaint (following the deadlines and procedures set out in the evaluation result letter).

Generally, the means of redress are the following:

• admissibility/eligibility or evaluation review (redress review) — within 30 days of receiving the letter
• for rejection decisions by EU executive agencies: request for review of legality under Article 22 of Regulation 58/2003 — within 1 month of receiving the letter
• action for annulment under Article 263 TFEU — within 2 months of receiving the letter.

Please do NOT take more than one formal action at a time. If you would like to use several of the redress means, start with the administrative review procedures first (e.g. first redress and then Article 22). Wait for the reply to your first complaint, and then take further action against that decision — if you continue to disagree. We will count the deadlines for further action always as from when you receive the reply to the previous complaint.

Please note that notifications which have not been opened within 10 days after sending are considered to have been accessed and that deadlines will be counted from opening/access (see Portal Terms and Conditions).

When filing a complaint, pay attention to who took the formal decision and that complaints must be brought against that service. If the decision was taken by an EU agency or other EU body, the complaint must be directed against that agency/body (NOT the European Commission).

Please note that you can also address complaints to the European Ombudsman, if you believe that there has been maladministration on our part — within 2 years after you became aware of it AND after you have used all the available means of administrative redress (admissibility/eligibility review, evaluation review and Article 22 request, if available) or at least contacted us about the matter.

Redress review

Redress requests must be related to the evaluation process or admissibility/eligibility check.

Your complaint must demonstrate a procedural irregularity, factual error, manifest error of assessment or misuse of powers. Mere repetitions of your application or mere disagreement with the result or the reasoning of the evaluation will NOT be considered.

Your review request will NOT automatically trigger a re-evaluation of your application. A re-evaluation will only be carried out if your request shows that the selection procedure was flawed by a breach which affects the final decision on whether to fund your project. This means, for example, that a problem relating to one award criterion will not lead to a re-evaluation of your proposal if, even by adding the maximum points for this criterion, the final score still remains below the funding threshold.

Should your request lead to a re-evaluation, it will be done on the application as initially submitted; no additional information is admissible. The re-evaluation will be partial (limited to the criterion affected by the error) or full (when the entire procedure was flawed), depending on the case. The score following re-evaluation will be regarded as definitive. Please be aware that this score may result in being lower than the original score.

Only one request for review per proposal will be considered.

All requests for review will be treated as confidential.