Article 24

An application must relate only to a single invention or to a group of interrelated inventions constituting a single general inventive concept. The applicant may, so long as his application has not been approved, divide the original application for the general invention into two or more applications. Divisional applications must possess the requirements of the original application, including the original filing date and, where applicable, its priority.

The Registration Authority is obliged, after the formal examination and before the substantive examination of the invention, to examine the unity of the invention and, where it determines that the invention lacks unity, to notify the applicant of the matter, together with the reasons, in writing, requiring him to limit his application to one invention. The applicant may state his reasons and explanations in objection to the opinion of the Registration Authority within one month. Where the relevant Registration Authority does not find the applicant's position well-founded, it shall examine one of the inventions set forth in the application, at the applicant's choice, on the basis of the separate claim groupings referred to in Note 2 of this Article. Where the applicant fails to respond or state his choice within the said period, only the first invention shall be examined. The applicant may file the other invention or inventions derived from the initial application with the Registration Authority in the form of new applications bearing the priority date of the initial invention, provided that he states in the new application the same text of the initial description. In the new application, it is possible to remove the names of inventors who played no role in that part of the invention.

Note 1 — Failure to state the relationship of the components in the general invention shall not invalidate the relevant certificate.

Note 2 — In order to facilitate the determination of unity of invention by the Registration Authority, the applicant is obliged to group his claims in an orderly sequence and separate them from one another. Where the application simultaneously contains claims concerning a process and a product, the process claims and product claims must also be separated and grouped apart from each other, in such a manner that no dependency exists between those groups of claims. This rule also applies to claims relating to the process of manufacture of that product and the process of its use. The manner of grouping the claims and arranging them shall be specified in the executive regulations of this Act.