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NEW EVIDENCE INADMISSIBLE IN ADMINISTRATIVE LITIGATION
Opinions have differed in practice as to whether parties are permitted to introduce new facts or evidence during administrative litigation over a trademark or patent case.
In a 2003 judgment in a trademark opposition case, the Taipei High Administrative Court stated that the aim of the litigation is to examine whether an administrative decision was unlawful. Under the Trademark Act as in force at the time of the original trademark opposition decision in question, any addition or amendment to the facts and grounds on which a trademark opposition petition was based should have been communi-cated to the trademark applicant, to enable him to present a defense; and when filing an opposition petition under Article 37 Subparagraphs 12 and 14 of the Act as in force at the time of the petition, each registered trademark that was relied upon as grounds for opposition constituted an inde-pendent basis for the right of opposition, and the Intellectual Property Office had to make a sepa-rate determination regarding each. If such a trademark was not asserted during the original opposition proceedings and was not considered by the IPO when reaching its original opposition decision, the court would not consider it when determining whether the original decision was unlawful. Therefore, evidence in support of the opposition that the plaintiff first introduced during the administrative litigation proceedings, was new evidence outside the scope of the original opposition action, and had not been considered by the IPO when reaching the ad-ministrative decision at issue. As such it fell outside the scope of the matters to be examined in the administrative litigation, and the court would not consider it.
At a meeting on 30 December 2003, the chief judges of the Supreme Court passed a resolution to adopt the same interpretation in trademark revocation cases. They stated that the purpose of an action for revocation as referred to in Article 4 of the Code of Administrative Procedure is to revoke an unlawful administrative decision made by an administrative agency. If, after an admin-istrative agency makes an administrative deci-sion, changes subsequently occur in the facts on which the decision was based, this does not mean that there was an error in the original determina-tion, and therefore such changes should not be a basis for the administrative court to revoke the decision as unlawful.
This above opinion is noteworthy, as it will af-fect the attitude of the administrative courts, the administrative appeals committee of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and IPO in handling simi-lar cases.