UPC Court of Appeal, 10 January 2024: Intervention requires being affected by the outcome
18-01-2024 Print this page
If you want to intervene in UPC proceedings the outcome of these proceedings must directly affect you. That is what the UPC Court of Appeal learns its Order of 10 January 2024 in Ocado v Autostore.
The appeal concerns an order by the Nordic-Baltic Regional Division of 17 October 2023 in which it was held that under article 45 UPCA the written procedure shall, in principle, be open to the public unless the Court decides to make it confidential.
In the appeal of that order two law firms wanted to intervene. They were interested in the pleas in law put forward in the appeal because they were involved in similar cases before the UPC. That is not enough to pass the hurdle of Rule 313 RoP that one can only intervene in a case if one has a “legal interest in the result of an action submitted to the Court”. These two applications to intervene in the appeal proceedings were refused by the UPC Court of Appeal in its order of 10 January 2024.
The Court made it clear that an “interest in the result of the action” within the meaning of Rule 313 RoP requires “a direct and present interest in the grant by the Court of the order or decision as sought by the party, whom the prospective intervener wishes to support and not an interest in relation to the pleas in law put forward.” The Court further indicated that “it is necessary to distinguish between prospective interveners establishing a direct interest in the ruling on the specific request sought by the supported party, and those who can establish only an indirect interest in the result of the case by reason of similarities between their situation and that of one of the parties. A similarity between two cases is not sufficient.”
