Key legal question
Whether the appeal remained procedurally relevant after the judge's recusal and the cantonal commission's mootness decision.
Extracted holding
The appeal was struck off the docket because the legal interest in reviewing the referral decision had fallen away.
Extracted reasoning
Once the challenged judge had declared recusal, the question whether the Handelsgericht had referred the recusal motion to an allegedly incompetent authority no longer affected the parties' legal position; the matter was therefore moot under Art. 32(2) BGG.