While Märpel rejoices for Ion Brumme and Malika Weaver, the new decisions do not solve the underlying problems of justice at the EPO. They only add a further layer of unpredictability to a situation that is severely dysfunctional.
AT-ILO is unpredictable. They do not follow their own jurisprudence, for example. The recent cases of Elisabeth Hardon and Patrick Corcoran, for example, are decided on the similar grounds of procedural economy: the court only argued that the disciplinary process was invalid and remitted the case. In the two cases, the court did not seek to determine whether the staff member was innocent or guilty, they simply argued that the decision was flawed. But one person was reinstated and the other one was not.
AT-ILO is also unpredictable because they sometimes decide on the matter (as an appeal court would do) and sometimes they only decide formally on the conditions of the procedure (as a court of review or "revisionsgericht" would do). In the case of Ion Brumme, for example, the court discusses at length whether the agreement that Ion Brumme signed, as chair of Suepo Munich, constituted misconduct and the tribunal notes that "a staff union must be free to conduct its own affairs". While Märpel can only rejoice that AT-ILO takes the role of a court of appeal (there is no other one), she also deplores the resulting unpredictability when this role is only taken in a fraction of the cases.
There is another gem in the latest decisions. Case 4052 was discussed in another blog and considers the situation of an ex employee of the EPO (dismissed in 2009, despite a national court rendering an opposite decision). The EPO initiated disciplinary proceedings against him in 2015, 6 years after he stopped working for the EPO for publishing his opinions on a personal blog. Indeed the EPO service regulations Articles 19 and 20 lay some limits as to what ex-employees may do and what they may publish, but common sense would interpret these articles quite differently. The normal way to oppose a blog for the EPO would be to go to a civil court. That would ensure equality of chances between an ex-employee and someone who never was an employee if they both start a blog. Or does the EPO wish to treat differently patent attorneys who are also ex-examiners and patent attorneys who never worked at the EPO, for example?
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I would like to repost here that comment about decision 4049 which was posted on the kluwer patent blog:
The whiff of scandal does not end with judgement 4052. As noted on another blog, judgement 4049 makes for alarming reading. However, to fully understand the significance of the judgement, it is necessary to provide a little bit of background information.
On 6 July 2016, the ILO-AT issued judgement no. 3694, which reached the following (seemingly very significant) conclusion with regard to the composition of EPO’s Internal Appeals Committee:
“The balance sought to be achieved by the composition of this body, which includes members appointed by the Administration and the staff representation, is a fundamental guarantee of its impartiality. That balanced composition is an essential feature underpinning its existence. WITHOUT IT, IT IS NOT THE APPEALS COMMITTEE”.
On 1 January 2017, AC decision CA/D 18/16 amended the Service Regulations by introduction of Article 36(2)(a). This allowed the President to make appointments to the Appeals Committee “by way of exception”.
On 5 May 2017, the decision impugned in case 4049 was issued by an Appeals Committee composed of a Chair, two members appointed by the President (Article 5(1) and (2) of the Implementing Rules), and two members “nominated by calling for volunteers or drawing lots from among eligible staff members in accordance with Article 36(2)(a)”.
Against all of this background, one might have expected the ILO-AT to refer to judgement no. 3694, and to find that the composition of the Appeals Committee still did not guarantee its impartiality. Indeed, a member of the Appeals Committee wrote a dissenting opinion to this effect.
The outcome? The ILO-AT sees no problem with the composition of the Appeals Committee, because it was in accordance with the relevant rules in force at that time.
Now, one might argue that impartiality is still ensured by the fact that the members appointed under Article 36(2)(a) must (presumably) still be elected Staff Committee members. However, that does not take into account the influence that the President has over the numbers of elected members and the conditions under which elections take place (Article 35 of the Service Regulations). It also ignores the possibility of the President pursuing a vindictive campaign of harassment against all Staff Committee members, with the result that few (if any) staff members would willing stand for election … thereby making it easy for the President to secure election of his “stooges” (who would of course be guaranteed to be protected from harassment).
Now, if anyone doubts that the President (or at least the soon to be ex-President) would ever consider conducting a vindictive campaign of harassment against staff representatives, based upon little or no proof of wrongdoing, then please refer to my earlier comments on this thread, where I point to a clear pattern of behaviour in this regard.
I guess this is just illustrative of a key problem with the ILO-AT: because it only examines matters from a formalistic standpoint (based solely upon the internal rules in force at the time, and without any attempt at independent fact-finding), it simply fails to see the wood for the trees.
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