In 2008, he had been named as one of the potential candidates to succeed Kamil Idris to lead the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO),[9] but Francis Gurry was eventually selected for the post.
On 1 March 2010 he was elected president of the European Patent Office (EPO), after a long and controversial series of meetings of the Administrative Council.
Under Battistelli's tenure, the EPO played an important role in the preparatory work for the introduction of the unitary patent, which came into existence on 1 June 2023.
[25] Battistelli's management style has also been criticized in the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf,[26][27] and by Philip Cordery, member of the French National Assembly.
[31] They wrote: “We are far too often put in front of the dilemma of either working according to the European Patent Convention and respecting the examiner’s guidelines, or issuing 'products' as our hierarchy demands".
An article published in the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung stated that it had obtained an internal report which showed that the EPO had tapped two publicly accessible computers that had been identified as a source for leaked information.