location of the building

LOCATION OF THE BUILDING

History was made on the night of 24 to 25 July 1952. After 18 hours of talks and many months during which the governments had failed to agree on where to base the institutions' headquarters, Luxembourg's Foreign Affairs Minister, Joseph Bech, suggested that the High Authority of the ECSC begin its work in Luxembourg, a suggestion which was finally adopted. The ECSC's first President, Jean Monnet, had instead envisaged a federal district that would fall outside national sovereignty, which he would have preferred to establish in Fontainebleau, near Paris. The Court of Justice was established in Villa Vauban, while the Common Assembly met in Strasbourg, as there was no suitable meeting room in Luxembourg.

This provisional arrangement, which according to Jean Monnet made Luxembourg a "crossroads of Europe", lasted many years. The High Authority of the ECSC remained in Luxembourg until the middle of the 1960s, when the executives of the ECSC, the European Economic Community and Euratom merged to create the European Commission.

Over the decades, the institutional "headquarters question" was the subject of lively political debate at European level. Even today, although decisions on the headquarters have been definitively confirmed by law, disagreement over the headquarters of the European Parliament arises periodically. The headquarters of the European Commission and the Council of Ministers are in Brussels. The European Parliament holds twelve of its plenary meetings in Strasbourg; the other plenary meetings take place in Brussels, as do committee and sub-committee meetings.

Luxembourg hosts:

– the Court of Justice, the Court of First Instance and the European Union Civil Service Tribunal;

– the European Court of Auditors;

– the General Secretariat of the European Parliament;

– some directorates-general and directorates of the European Commission, in particular Eurostat, the statistical office; a significant part of the Directorate-General for Translation (including the directorates responsible for the languages of the new Member States), the directorates responsible for the information society, informatics, health and consumer protection, safety and health at work and nuclear energy; administration services and the Office for Infrastructures and Logistics in Luxembourg;

– the European Investment Bank and European Investment Fund;

– the Publications Office of the European Union, the EU's official publisher, which notably publishes the Official Journal of the European Union, containing the main Community legal acts;

– the Translation Centre for the Bodies of the European Union.