New hope for the UPC – part II

There is renewed hope for the Unified Patent Court (UPC), the new court that should enable unitary European patents, which do not need to be validated separately in specific countries after the grant of a European application.

Our news article of 30 November (in Dutch) 2020 began with exactly the same sentence as above, and was written at the time in response to the UPC Treaty ratified on 18 December 2020, which was adopted with over 2/3 of the votes. Although, for the sake of completeness, we mentioned in this article that “of course, a complaint can still be filed again”, we could not have suspected at the time that this would actually happen – even numerous complaints.

Whereas earlier constitutional objections in Germany managed to delay the ratification of the UPC by more than three years, the German Federal Constitutional Court announced on 9 July 2021 that two recent objections are inadmissible and will therefore not be considered. The reason given by the German Constitutional Court is that the complainants have not sufficiently substantiated the possible violation of their fundamental rights.

An important hurdle has been cleared, and we continue to monitor developments closely.

The next step is for Germany, and at least two other Member States, to ratify a protocol as a formality.