Human Rights Council Opens With New Work On IP

The UN Human Rights Council opened yesterday morning, with its session planned to run until 1 October. Several new reports that touch on issues of innovation and indigenous protection are expected to be presented.

The Working Group on the Right to Development will submit the report of a session it held in Geneva in April, at which members discussed, among other things, “impediments in access to knowledge and intellectual property rights” related to access to medicines, and suggested that a “right to development” approach could be used to make up for difficulties in using flexibilities granted under international IP rules.

Also to be discussed during the council meeting is the report of the UN special rapporteur on the human rights and fundamental freedoms of indigenous people, which addresses the “absence of clarity with respect to corporate responsibility, especially transnational corporate responsibility, in relation to indigenous rights.” It calls for such groups to exercise “due diligence” to protect the rights of indigenous peoples, including through use of appropriate benefit-sharing mechanisms. Intellectual property rights as related to indigenous communities are still being discussed at the World Intellectual Property Organization, the Convention on Biological Diversity, and in other international fora.

The reports for this session of the HRC can be found here.