Summary

In this day and age, judges are not involved in adjudication as their main activity only. Since 1 January 2015, the author of the contribution has been serving as External Member on the Grand Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office. In the spring and summer of this year, she was involved in the work of the Grand Board of Appeal in the capacity of a so-called rapporteur. The contribution, however, does not concern patent litigation but rather the review of a disciplinary case involving a senior official of the Board of Appeal of the European Patent Office, whose effective equivalent in the Estonian context may be considered to be a judge of a court of appeal.
The review of the case turned up several legal issues concerning the judging of a judge. At the same time, parallels to the legal situation in Estonia arose. However, how would we in Estonia act in this procedural or legal situation? Without examining the substantive circumstances of the case, the articles seeks answers to these questions: Should the hearing of a body reviewing a disciplinary case involving a judge be public? If yes, can there be exceptions to the principle of openness? What are the general principles of disciplinary proceedings that the collection of evidence should be guided by? What general principles apply to the control that a party exercising disciplinary authority has over a judge? How to collect evidence in disciplinary proceedings and may evidence collected in breach of procedural provisions be used by a court hearing a disciplinary case? To begin with, the author delves into the fundamental issue of whether the Grand Board of Appeal is an independent body at all in the settlement of these disciplinary disputes.