36. In those circumstances, it must be accepted that under Article 16(1) of that regulation, Member States enjoy discretion as to the powers with which they intend to endow their national bodies for the purpose of protecting passengers’ rights, to which the Court moreover expressly referred in paragraph 36 of Ruijssenaars and Others.
37. Since Article 5(1)(c) of Regulation No 261/2004 confers on air passengers the right to compensation in the event of cancellation of their flight, there is nothing, in my view, to prevent a Member State from endowing its national body with the power to order an air carrier to pay the compensation due in order to ensure that that right is respected. Failure to respect that right constitutes not only a breach of the contractual obligations of air carriers, but also a failure to apply that regulation properly.
38. As regards, in the second place, the provisions set out in Article 16(2) and (3) of Regulation No 261/2004, my view is that they have neither the object nor the effect of restricting the scope of the powers which Member States may confer on their national bodies.
39. I note that, under Article 16(2) of that regulation, ‘each passenger may complain to any body designated under paragraph 1, or to any other competent body designated by a Member State, about an
alleged infringement of [that] Regulation at any airport situated on the territory of a Member State or concerning any flight from a third country to an airport situated on that territory’.
40. It follows from both Ruijssenaars and Others, concerning the interpretation of Regulation No 261/2004, and Irish Ferries, concerning the interpretation of Regulation No 1177/2010, that the ‘complaint’ referred to in Article 16(2) of Regulation No 261/2004 differs, by its nature and scope, from an individual claim made by a passenger seeking the compensation due to him or her on account of the cancellation of a transport service. According to the Court, that complaint amounts to a report by the passenger intended to draw the competent body’s attention to the alleged infringement of an obligation on carriers with a view to contributing to the proper application of the regulations at issue in general. The Court made clear, in Ruijssenaars and Others, that such a complaint does not require ‘[the national body] to act … in order to guarantee each individual passenger’s right to obtain compensation’ (26) and stated, in Irish Ferries, that the carrier ‘has a certain discretion as to the action to be taken in response to that report’. (27)