Gowling WLG in Boehringer Ingelheim International GmbH v Zentiva Portugal, LDA, UPC Court of Appeal, 24 February 2026, UPC-COA-0000009/2026
and
Gowling WLG in Sumi Agro Limited and Sumi Agro Europe Limited v Syngenta Limited, UPC Court of Appeal, 24 February 2026, UPC-COA-0000010/2026
These related decisions (the wording is in many parts identical) will be of interest to practitioners and other parties who may wish to obtain documents from the UPC court file.
The law firm Gowling WLG had in each case submitted requests to the Court of Appeal for copies of certain documents on the court file, including various pleadings and exhibits to those pleadings. Regarding the exhibits, Gowling had requested, “in particular, Exhibits evidencing the threat of infringement or actual infringement; Exhibits relevant to the balance of interest.”
Gowling mentioned in their applications that these documents were not requested for the purpose of any pending or upcoming proceedings. Gowling wished to have copies of these documents to gain a better understanding how the parties and the UPC conducted the proceedings and ultimately reached its decision in view of the arguments brought forward by the parties and the evidence relied upon in the context of preliminary injunction proceedings. Such understanding was said by Gowling to be important for them, as a firm of UPC representatives, in order to enable them to provide professional and expert advice to their clients, which would benefit both the Court and their users.
The CoA allows the requests in part. Important principles that it applied and which should be borne in mind by anyone making future requests are:
- When a request for access is made, the interest of the member of the public to obtain access must be balanced against the general interests in Art. 45 UPCA; protection of confidential information and personal data, and of justice, including the protection of the integrity of proceedings, and public order.
- These interests are usually properly balanced and duly weighed against each other, if access to written pleadings and evidence is given to a member of the public after the proceedings have come to an end by a decision of the Court. (See CoA, 10 April 2024, UPC_CoA_404/2023, Ocado.)
- Reasoned requests to the Registry for written pleadings and evidence (access to documents pursuant to R. 262.1(b) RoP), lodged at the Court of First Instance, shall be made to the relevant Division. Similarly, reasoned requests for written pleadings and evidence, lodged at the Court of Appeal, shall be made to the Court of Appeal.
- Re-lodging on appeal of documents lodged at the Court of First Instance is normally not called for since the Court of Appeal shall consult the file of the proceedings before the Court of First Instance pursuant to R. 222.1 RoP. Such consultation does not generate any copies of the documents into the file of the proceedings before the Court of Appeal.
- Precision is required in the request: Gowling WLG’s request for Application documents filed on 2 December 2024 and 18 December 2024 was dismissed since there were no such documents in the appeal file. Although the request could be vitiated by a spelling error, the consequences of any such mistakes will fall on the requesting party.
- A request for written pleadings and evidence must be specified to the greatest extent possible and cannot be made in terms which would require the Court to search and select documents based on relevance criteria set up by the requesting party. In the present case, there are many exhibits in the appeal file, and the request cannot be understood without specification. The request is ambiguous since it refers both to all exhibits and to some exhibits in particular with selection criteria.
Applying these principles the court allowed the request for the specified pleadings but dismissed the request in so far as it related to exhibits that had not been specifically identified.
A copy of the decision can be found here.
