The Boards of Appeal as Hybrid Adjudicators: On Some Shortcomings of Article 58a of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union

This chapter examines Article 58a of the Statute of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) that was introduced through Regulation 2019/ 629.1 By establishing a filtering mechanism for appeals brought before the Court of Justice (ECJ) against General Court (GC) decisions concerning the decisions of the Boards of Appeal (BoAs) set up within the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO), the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA), and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), Article 58a seems to have turned these into ‘court substitutes’ to all intents and purposes. This chapter aims to demonstrate that the new legislative framework, in addition to posing important challenges to the EU judiciary, underlines the need for procedural and organizational legislative rules for these BoAs that are more in line with the principles laid down in Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (CFR). This is especially the case for the BoAs of EUIPO, the legal regime of which raises the most problems and the decisions of which are, from a quantitative point of view, those that have been primarily affected by the 2019 reform.