Bonum Certa Men Certa

The 168th Meeting of the EPO Administrative Council as a Test of the EPO's Oversight Mechanisms

Press the image below for more

EPO voting datasheet
Gallery of 'rogues' (2013) compared to 2021 as image | Complete HTML version of the same (the above image is not complete but merely a preview)



Summary: The Administrative Council of the European Patent Organisation is having its 168th meeting this Wednesday and we expect no expression of remorse for illegally crushing EPO staff (almost 7,000 individuals and their families) for nearly a decade; some of the culprits (10 of them to be precise) are still their nation's public face

As the EPO's Administrative Council gets ready for its 168th meeting this Wednesday - 13 October 2021 - it seems like a good idea to compare the current composition of the Council to that during the 136th meeting in June 2013 when Benoît Battistelli's "Strike Regulations" were adopted.



Since then many of the heads of delegation have changed. However, ten delegations are still headed by the same person as in June 2013:

- Czech Republic: Josef KRATOCHVÍL - Croatia: Ljiljana KUTEROVAC - Iceland: Borghildur ERLINGSDÓTTIR - Ireland: Gerard BARRETT - Malta: Godwin WARR - Monaco: Jean-Pierre SANTOS - San Marino: Silvia ROSSI - Turkey: Habip ASAN - Belgium; Jérôme DEBRULLE - Italy: Mauro MASI

"The current governance crisis at the EPO - triggered by the recent ILOAT judgments which struck down the "Strike Regulations" - shows how important it is to expose the workings of the Administrative Council to public scrutiny."Two of those delegations - namely Belgium and Italy - abstained from endorsing Battistelli's "Strike Regulations". The other eight delegations voted in favour.

There are two further delegations where the previous head of delegation has been replaced by the person who was their deputy in June 2013.

- Finland: Antti RIIVARI (successor to Rauni HAGMAN) - Estonia: Margus VIHER (successor to Matti PÄTS)

Both the Finnish and Estonian delegations voted in favour of Battistelli's "Strike Regulations".

The current governance crisis at the EPO - triggered by the recent ILOAT judgments which struck down the "Strike Regulations" - shows how important it is to expose the workings of the Administrative Council to public scrutiny.

"When exercising its legislative powers, the Council is supposed to respect the primary law of the EPC as well as international legal norms to which its contracting states subscribe."The Administrative Council is the governing body of the organisation EPO which has been entrusted with a limited set of legislative powers. In particular, it can make amendments to the EPO's internal employment law, codified in the "EPO Service Regulations".

When exercising its legislative powers, the Council is supposed to respect the primary law of the EPC as well as international legal norms to which its contracting states subscribe.

However, in contrast to an elected parliamentary legislative body, the EPO's Administrative Council is not subject to any meaningful form of public accountability if it should happen to abuse its legislative powers. It is only subject to very weak judicial oversight by the ILOAT.

As recently seen in the case of Battistelli's "Strike Regulations", it has taken eight years to strike down a flawed legislative measure which breached the fundamental rights of EPO staff.

It now remains to be seen how the Council in its current composition is going to react to the EPO's governance crisis at its upcoming 168th meeting.

"It now remains to be seen how the Council in its current composition is going to react to the EPO's governance crisis at its upcoming 168th meeting."It can be safely assumed that Team Campinos - which appears to be in complete denial about the implications of the recent ILOAT judgments - is doing its best to feed the Council delegates a sugar-coated narrative, in the hope that they will fail to realise the seriousness of the situation.

A lot will depend on whether the Council delegates are capable of doing their own homework and thinking for themselves, or whether they just prefer to "go with the flow" and swallow the snake-oil being spoon-fed to them by António Campinos and his cronies.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Slopwatch: Brian Fagioli, Google News, and Other LLM Slopfarms
Why does Google News keep promoting these fake articles?
Links 29/10/2025: Amazon Kept "Data Center Water Use Secret", "Abuse of Power" Against Media
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/10/2025: "My Hardware Specs" and "Goodbye Debian…"
Links for the day
EPO Cocainegate: Feedback and Clarifications
Part III will come out soon
Links 29/10/2025: "US Military Is Destroying the Planet Beyond Imagination" and Boat Strikes Deemed Unlawful
Links for the day
Quality Comes First (Techrights Search)
It's generally working already, but we wish to polish it some more
Techrights Party Countdown
Late next week we'll be holding a party near our home
European Parliament and Council Directive on Privacy is Vanishing
"edited / censored some time more recently"
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, October 28, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, October 28, 2025
Slopwatch: The March of Slopfarms, From UbuntuPIT to Linux Journal and to Various Fake Sites Still Promoted by Google News
It's so worrying to see what the Web has become
Links 29/10/2025: CISA, Ukraine, and Amazon Problems
Links for the day
[Teaser] The EPO's Spokesperson, a Cocaine User, Fancies Young Women
How's that for "optics" in the EU and Europe's second-largest institution?
How Will António Campinos Respond to the EPO's 'Cocainegate'?
That's the same thing we saw and still see when the press deals with enablers and partners of Jeffrey Epstein
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part IV: There Cannot be Free Software Without Free Press and Free Information
One day, one can hope, more people will recognise that for Software Freedom we need free press and free thinkers
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part III: Principled Stance Is Never Cheap
Protecting the truth and insisting that the general public is made aware of things that really happened isn't cheap
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part II: Because Scarcity of Accurate Information Breeds Collective Ignorance
we too will strive to share information that's aggressively suppressed
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: More New Arrivals at Geminispace, xkcd on "Document Forgery"
Links for the day
Join Us Now and Share the News - Part I: Defence of the Truth
This year we make a very strong, firm statement for truth, even if that means explaining our work to the top media judge in the country
Links 28/10/2025: Meta and Fentanylware (CheeTok) Age-Restricted Down Under, "Britain Needs China’s Money"
Links for the day
Links 28/10/2025: Mass Layoffs at Amazon and Charter to Cut 1,200 Jobs
Links for the day
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part II: The Person Who Planted Paid-for Fake News for the European Patent Office (EPO) is a Cocaine User, Friend of António Campinos, Now on Record as Having Been Arrested
Background: High-level manager at the European Patent Office caught in public with cocaine, arrested
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, October 27, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, October 27, 2025
Google News Drowning in Slop (and Slopfarms That Hijack About Half the Results)
Google News seems to be drowning in this stuff
Gemini Links 28/10/2025: "How to Maximize Your Positive Impact" and ASCII Art and Artist Attribution
Links for the day
PETA and Activism
Being staff or volunteer in PETA isn't easy
Big Blue, Huge Debt
debt will soar again
Links 27/10/2025: Mass Surveillance Sold as "AI", People Reluctant to Lose Physical Media
Links for the day
Parties and Milestones Again
we've begun putting up about 40 balloons
Techrights' 19th Anniversary: Bronze
Time to go back to preparing for this anniversary
Our Latest European Patent Office (EPO) Series Will Last Several Weeks, Will Ask the EPO Management and the European Union (EU) Very Difficult Questions
If nobody loses a job (or jobs) over this, then the EU basically became no better than Colombia or Nicaragua
Slopwatch: LinuxSecurity, UbuntuPIT, Brian Fagioli, and Google News
We focus on stories that are fake or LLM slop that disguises itself as "news" about Linux
Links 27/10/2025: Wikipedia Vandalism, Bruce Perens Opens up on Childhood
Links for the day
This Site Could Not be Done by LLMs Even If It Wanted to (Because It's Not a Parrot of What Other Sites Say)
LLMs have no knowledge or deep understanding
Microsoft is Disloyal Towards Its Most Loyal Employees
Against its most faithful enablers
19 Years, No Censorship
No factual information is ever going to be removed, more so if it is in the public interest
We Are Not a Conventional Site, That's Why They Hate (or Love) Us
Throughout the week this week we'll be focusing on the EPO
Following the Line of Cocaine All the Way to the Top
Even a million denials and spin-doctoring won't distract from the core issue
The Cocaine Patent Office - Part I: António Campinos Brought Corruption and Nepotism to the EPO, Then Came the Cocaine
High-level manager at the European Patent Office (EPO) caught in public with cocaine, the Office has some answering to do
Purchasing/Possessing Computers Isn't the Same as Controlling Computers
Let's strive to put computers back under the control of their users, no matter who purchased these (usually the users)
Gemini Links 27/10/2025: Alhena 5.4.3 and Fixing Bash
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, October 26, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, October 26, 2025
Thankfully We've Made Copies of More Interesting Data From statCounter
If statCounter (the Web site or the 'webapp') vanished overnight, we'd still have something left of it
More Silent Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat
when the media counts such layoffs or presents tallies the numbers are very incomplete