On 12 March 2025, the General Court ruled in Case T-349/23 (Semedo v Parliament) on the requirements for a fair trial in disciplinary proceedings within the European Parliament (EP).

In March 2022, the EP's Advisory Committee launched an investigation into former MEP Monica Semedo. The proceedings were initiated following a complaint of psychological harassment by her former parliamentary assistant. In November 2022, the committee concluded that her conduct constituted psychological harassment and recommended that her daily allowance be suspended for 20 days. One month later, Ms Semedo received an anonymised version of the investigation report with an invitation to comment. However, her request to inspect the full file in January 2023 was rejected. In the following April, the EP's President, David Sassoli, found that certain conduct on the part of Ms Semedo constituted psychological harassment and imposed a reduced penalty in the form of forfeiture of entitlement to the subsistence allowance for a period of 10 days. Monica Semedo then brought an action for annulment before the EU's General Court (GC).

The Court found that the decisions of the EP's President were void due to substantial procedural errors with regard to Ms Semedo's defence rights and must therefore be annulled. In particular, the applicant was denied access to a summary of the witness statements and to essential documents on which the allegations against her were based. However, these documents played a decisive role in establishing the harassment and imposing the penalty. This deprived the person concerned of the opportunity to defend herself adequately, which inevitably affected the content of the contested decisions.