3.4. No objection to the board as a whole

In T 2440/16 of 17 May 2022 date: 2022-05-17 the board held that an objection under Art. 24 EPC must always be directed at specific members of the board. Partiality is a characteristic of an individual person and therefore cannot be ascribed to a deciding body per se but only to its members.

In T 1966/17 the board held that appellant 2's suspicion of partiality of all the board members simply because they did not agree with its submissions and because they expressed a different opinion could not support its allegation of partiality. To the contrary, such reasoning could not be considered to be based on the objective criteria relating to partiality as indicated in G 1/05 (OJ 2007, 362, point 20 of the Reasons). For this reason alone, i.e. the lack of substantiation, the objection of partiality was found to be inadmissible.