Summary: With the Unified Patent Court (UPC) Agreement (UPCA) we're already seeing the role played by German courts in undermining laws and constitutions; Is there any hope that Germany as a country will ever put an end to EPO abuses? The apathy (if not active complicity, set aside passive corruption) merely serves to to discredit or delegitimise the state...

THE EPO is basically above German law despite being based in Germany. Many times in the past we wrote about how the German government had intentionally turned a blind eye to EPO corruption. Some of the worst corruption is yet to be exposed (there's truly explosive material).

At what stage does one categorically accept that the so-called ministry of 'justice' in Germany and its constitutional court (FCC) as well are in cahoots with or participating in this corruption? There are some concrete examples of entryism and one might say "collusion"...

Well, Constitutional Court judge Prof. Huber is leaving, after rejecting two UPC complaints without really looking into them. One complainant just wrote the following text:

Patent Law: End of the term of office of Constitutional Court judge Prof. Huber – When a constitutional complaint outlasts the twelve-year term of office of the judge responsible for it (Published on 08/12/2022)

For years, several constitutional complaints against acts of the European Patent Office have been pending before the German Constitutional Court (“BVerfG”). Five such proceedings are currently publicly known, namely those with the docket numbers 2 BvR 2480/10, 2 BvR 421/13, 2 BvR 786/15, 2 BvR 756/16 and 2 BvR 561/18 (afterwards “EPO complaints”), in which, among other things, a violation of the fundamental rights to effective legal protection (Article 19 (4) of the Grundgesetz [“GG”]) and to the lawful judge (Article 101 (1) sentence 2 GG) is complained of.

As is well known, the decisions of the BVerfG – as well as of other panels of judges to which several judges belong (so-called “collegial courts” [“Kollegialgerichte”]) – are prepared by the so-called “judge rapporteur”, or short “rapporteur”. The rapporteur for the EPO complaints in the responsible Second Senate is judge Prof. Peter M. Huber, who, in the field of intellectual property law, is known in particular for the not necessarily consistent decisions on the European patent reform for which he was the rapporteur as well.

The oldest two EPO complaints, dating from 2010 and 2013, have been listed since 2016 in the so-called “annual preview” (“Jahresvorschau”) of the BVerfG, which provides an overview at the beginning of a calendar year of those proceedings that the court intends to decide in the course of the year. Since 2021, all aforementioned EPO complaints have been listed in the annual preview of the court. Judge Prof. Huber has already indicated in a commentary in 2018 that he may consider the legal protection at the EPO to be in line with the minimum required by the German Grundgesetz.

Nevertheless, not a single one of the EPO complaints has been decided to date.

Read on for the rest... ⬆