Co-pending applications: Collision course

It is a well-established legal concept in Europe that ‘co-pending’ patent applications are available for the purpose of assessing the novelty of a European patent application that
has been filed between the priority/filing date (the effective date) and publication date of an earlier application. Normally, both a parent application and its related divisional application possess the same effective date for the assessment of patentability and so cannot be cited against one another.