Brussels, 05/09/2002 (Agence Europe) - The European Commission is calling for disputes linked to the future Community patent to be initially placed under the exclusive jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. The creation of a decentralised Chamber in Member States could only be envisaged after this, when the Court has developed a "common line of procedure and a coherent case law", it states in a working document adopted last week.
The relevant jurisdiction for patents, with that for languages, is one of the two issues that are currently blocking a decision within the Council on the creation of the Community patent. This decision should have been adopted at the end of 2001. No noteworthy progress has, however, been accomplished recently. Germany and Spain in particular insist that part of the administration of justice should be decentralised. France insists on the centralised processing of disputes. Article 229 of the Nice Treaty, if the Treaty is ratified, gives the Court of Justice the power to rule on disputes linked to the application of acts that create Community intellectual property rights, and Article 225 has allowed the creation of specialised Chambers attached to the Court of First Instance of the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
In its document, the Commission considers that Community jurisdiction centralised and specialised in questions affecting the patent will guarantee coherence of jurisdiction and uniqueness in law. The Community Patent Court would come under the Court of First Instance. It would not only deal with disputes linked to counterfeiting but also with the validity of the patent. In a first stage, the specialised tribunal would be composed of seven judges. With such resources, the first instance should be able to deal with 120 to 150 cases per year, says the Commission. These resources would, it says, be enough to deal with the first cases as the Community patent is set in place and create a body of law. In response to arguments concerning proximity between justice and users as invoked by several Member States, the Commission remarks that hearings could be organised in Member States rather than with the use of a videoconference or on site. The organisation of hearings in a Member State will, however, only be possible if the Member State in question has, at its own cost, made the necessary infrastructure available to the court.
Once the volume of work of the administration of justice has increased, it could be justified, in order to achieve efficiency, to create one or several regional Chambers in Member States that are concerned by the disputes. The Commission considers it is necessary to establish clear criteria for launching the mechanism for the creation of such regional chambers and to take provisions to share powers between the central chamber and regional chambers. At any rate, these decentralised chambers should be an integral part of the same central Community jurisdiction and have the same level of professionalism as the central chamber.