Source: https://eulawanalysis.blogspot.com/2015/05/cheerleading-or-judging-cjeu-upholds.html
Timestamp: 2017-11-24 23:56:29
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EU Law Analysis: Cheerleading or judging? The CJEU upholds the EU's unitary patent system
Cheerleading or judging? The CJEU upholds the EU's unitary patent system
Two new CJEU judgments (here and here) have today upheld the legality of the EU rules on the unitary patent. To what extent are the Court's reasons convincing and coherent?
Since Member States could not reach the required unanimity on the patent translation rules, most Member States agreed to apply the process of ‘enhanced cooperation’, ie adopting EU legislation that applied to some Member States, but not others. This entailed a two-step procedure: authorisation of enhanced cooperation by the Council (by a qualified majority vote of all Member States), and then the adoption of the legislation to implement enhanced cooperation, with only the participating Member States voting. Spain and Italy challenged the initial authorisation (adopted in 2011) regarding patents, but the CJEU ruled against them in 2013. The two Regulations implementing enhanced cooperation in this area were adopted, in the meantime, at the end of 2012, concerning the substantive rules governing a ‘unitary patent’ and the language rules. Spain (this time without Italy) challenged these measures in turn; those two challenges are the subject of today’s judgment.
The CJEU did not really rule on any of the many interesting questions about the substantive grounds governing the implementation of enhanced cooperation, simply because Spain did not raise them. However, the argument relating to discrimination touches indirectly upon those issues.
Similarly, the Court’s argument that the Meroni principle was not infringed is sensible enough – if one accepts its separate conclusion that the main Regulation validly conferred implementing powers upon Member States. But that conclusion brings us to the chain of contradictions in the Court’s reasoning. For the powers that Member States will exercise when implementing the unitary patent Regulations will not result in divergent approaches in each country’s individual national laws, as is normally the case when Member States are left with the powers to implement EU law in practice. Rather, they must exercise their powers collectively, to adopt uniform rules regarding the unitary patent, within the context of the EPO. Indeed, the Court’s other conclusions insist upon the uniform nature of that patent. This points us inexorably toward the conclusion that uniform rules to implement the Regulations were necessary – which means (according to the Treaties) that such powers ought to have been conferred upon the Commission.
Posted by Steve Peers at 06:42
Labels: CJEU case law, enhanced cooperation, European Patent Convention, European Patent Office, implementing measures, Meroni, patents, Spain, Unified Patent Court, unitary patent