Tread cautiously: petitions for review

In Committee on Patent Law minutes covering preparatory work for EPC 2000, it was generally acknowledged that the purpose of introducing Article 112a EPC is “to create a comparable, strictly limited possibility to apply for a further review of decisions of the boards of appeal of the EPO”, realising that “under certain circumstances many legal systems offer a possibility to review final decisions of a court which are res judicata”, with the possibility to set aside a decision of a board of appeal only if it suffers from a major defect, so that maintaining it without further review would be intolerable.