The Office has progressively and severely eroded a number of fundamental union rights. Having tried unsuccessfully to protect them through all other avenues, SUEPO The Hague(VEOB) and the EPO-wide umbrella organisation SUEPO Central (SUEPO) sought an injunction against the EPO with the Courts in The Hague.

The judgment can be found in the database and a printable version is available here.
Translations are available in English, French and German.

The outcome of the judgment and its consequences are detailed in this publication (fr, de).

IPKat publishes the decision of the Enlarged Board of Appeal (EBoA) under Article 23 EPC.It explains why the EBoA rejected the request made by the Administrative Council (AC) chairman, Mr Kongstad, seeking the dismissal of a Board Member for the events leading up to the house ban.

In another post, IPKat publishes the most significant arguments:

Contrary to what Merpel had understood, the request was NOT rejected for the procedural reason that Mr. Kongstad had made the request rather than the AC making the request as Article 23 requires. Indeed the EBA found that Mr. Kongstad was authorised to make the request on behalf of the AC.

• The request was rejected because it was not properly substantiated. The AC had commissioned a report from a specially constituted Disciplinary Committee (DC). That DC's report formed the substance of the case, and was accompanied by a USB stick containing a mass of documents and files, which were said to be the evidence against the Board Member.
• The EBA held that the DC report did not sufficiently document the facts and evidence for two of the five allegations it held to have been proven, and nor did it express a view on the reliability of the evidence itself. This meant that neither the EBA itself nor the Board Member being accused was able to preoperly understand and respond to the case being made and it was not reasonable for the EBA and the other party to trawl through the USB stick to reconstitute the evidence.

IPKat reports that the Investigative Unit of the European Patent Office paid an unexpected visit to two SUEPO officials in the Hague, who were taken away for an interrogation. On their return, they were badly shaken and required medical treatment and have been on sick leave since.

On 17 November, three further SUEPO officials, who knew they were being investigated for alleged disciplinary offences, were suspended from service and banned from the premises. The Office says, with a perfectly straight face, that "it is not targeting the union". The union has actually been decapitated.

Within two hours of the news of the suspension spreading, some 2,000 employees had organised themselves into a demonstration. The Munich police closed off Erhardstrasse with almost no notice to facilitate this demonstration, and Merpel’s very many eye-witness correspondents tell her that the most remarkable fact of this large attendance was that it contained a lot of new faces, particularly at Director level.

The suspension of three staff representatives in Munich and the attacks on two more in The Hague, attracted quite some attention, most of it rather critical of the EPO. The events were covered by:Pierre-Yves Le Borgn',FOSS Patents,IPKat (here and here),Merkur Online,NRC (translations inEnglish,French andGerman),World Intellectual Property Review

Further EPO related news can be found on IPKat.