Commentaries: Art. 14

The Registry shall establish the required dispute resolution services. It shall regulate the organisation of and the procedure for these services while respecting the following rules and principles:
1. the services provide extrajudicial dispute resolution processes conducted by neutral and independent experts;
2. the services are responsible for ruling on disputes between holders of domain names and holders of trademark rights;
3. the decisions of the experts concerning domain names have mandatory force for the Registry concerned, unless a civil action is raised within the deadline allowed by the rules of procedure;
4. the decisions of the experts relate to the legitimacy of the allocation of a domain name; they may not award damages or pronounce on the validity of a claim under trademark law;
5. the rules governing the resolution of disputes must be based on accepted best practice;
6. the procedure must be fair, transparent, rapid and beneficial; the experts mandated by the services may not be subject to any general or particular directive on the solution of a dispute; they may take all steps necessary for the resolution of a dispute;
7. the dispute resolution procedure ends with the withdrawal of the application, the conclusion of an agreement between the parties, the decision of the experts or the opening of a civil action.
The structure of the organisation, the rules governing the resolution of disputes, the rules of procedure and the appointment of the experts called upon to come to a decision require the approval of OFCOM. Beforehand, the latter shall seek the opinion of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property and, if the case relates to the structure of the organisation or the procedural rules, the Federal Office of Justice.¹
On request, the Registry shall transmit to the acting dispute resolution service all the personal data in its possession which is necessary for the resolution of a dispute.
It may publish or arrange to have published the decisions taken by the experts. The parties’ names and other personal information may only be published if such details are essential in order to understand the decisions.²

Amended by No I of the O of 18 Nov. 2020, in force since 1 Jan. 2021 (AS 2020 6251). ↩
Amended by No I of the O of 15 Sept. 2017, in force since 1 Nov. 2017 (AS 2017 5225). ↩

Art. 14

Footnotes