2.6.8 No partial admissibility of appeal

The admissibility of an appeal can only be assessed as a whole (T 382/96, T 1763/06, T 509/07, T 2001/14). There is no support in the EPC for a notion of 'partial admissibility' of an appeal (T 774/97, T 509/07, T 2339/12, T 1311/13, T 1679/17).

The board in T 509/07 thus found it immaterial for the purposes of the admissibility of the appeal whether or not sufficient grounds relating to the main request had been submitted, where the first auxiliary request clearly complied with the admissibility requirements of Art. 108, third sentence, EPC. However, it is a different question whether a request in relation to which the admissibility requirements of Art. 108, third sentence, EPC are not met is admitted into the appeal proceedings. In T 382/96 and T 509/07, such unsubstantiated requests were not admitted. See also T 1763/06 and T 2001/14.

In T 1679/17, the board stated that so long as one objection to the contested decision had been raised in compliance with R. 99(2) EPC, the entire appeal was admissible. Even if other objections were not adequately substantiated as per Art. 12(2) RPBA 2020, this did not entail any partial inadmissibility that could no longer be remedied by a later submission. Rather, it merely meant that the admission of those objections (assuming they were not substantiated until later in the proceedings) would be at the board's discretion under whichever provision was applicable at the time of their belated substantiation (Art. 13(1) or 13(2) RPBA 2020).