WTO Director General Presents TRIPS As Major Tool For Trade Growth

World Trade Organization Director General Roberto Azevêdo this week hailed WTO’s intellectual property agreement, saying the past two decades show it provides a balanced multilateral foundation for the growth of trade in knowledge-rich products and services.

IP Importance Growing

Speaking at an event on 20 October, Azevêdo, said that since the inception of the 1994 WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), IP “has only grown in policy and economic significance,” according to his speech available here.

Underlining the role of the WTO in “building and sustaining a transparent and rules-based multilateral trading system,” he also said a number of challenges had to be dealt with, such as dispute settlement becoming more complex.

The TRIPS agreement, he said, was built recognising the need for an effective balance between the “adequate protection” of IP rights and the benefits “that such protection would bring to society.”

“TRIPS was… a landmark agreement,” he said, and “built substantive IP standard into multilateral trade law for the first time.”

TRIPS incorporated into WTO key conventions of the World Intellectual Property Organization, such as the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property and the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, he said. TRIPS also established multilateral standards for “the balanced and effective enforcement of IP rights” to fight illegitimate trade, he said.

And TRIPS linked IP standards with the WTO dispute settlement system, he added, providing a way to deal with “contentious IP matters between trading partners in a rules-based and transparent manner.”

WTO TRIPS-Related Work; Link to WIPO

TRIPS-related work is being carried out at the WTO in several areas, Azevêdo said, including in the TRIPS Council, which has reviewed the IP systems of some 130 WTO members. “This is the most active and the most geographically inclusive period of legal and policy development ever witnessed in the field of IP,” he said.

A second area of work on TRIPS at the WTO is the TRIPS Council’s focus on public policy questions, he said. In particular, “public health is undoubtedly the TRIPS-related policy issue that has attracted the most attention over the past two decades,” he said, referring to the 2001 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health as a landmark.

In that declaration, he said, the world’s trade ministers “underscored that the IP system, and TRIPS in particular, formed part of the solution” to public health challenges.

Azevêdo mentioned the ongoing joint effort of the WTO, WIPO and the World Health Organization on public health issues, and a “trilateral study providing a unique overview of the full policy framework supporting innovation and access in medical technology.” A trilateral policy symposium is scheduled to take place on 5 November at the WTO.

More broadly, the director general said the Bali package agreed in December 2013 is a “major breakthrough,” which promises a new era in negotiations. However, he said WTO members “are now facing a considerable challenge in implementing what they agreed in December.”

In particular, he underlined two issues discussed at the TRIPS Council failing to show progress: the protection of geographical indications, and the relationship of the patent system with the principles of the Convention on Biological Diversity, remarking that the old divide between the North and the South shifted on some issues, such as the protection of geographical indications.

TRIPS Council meets next on 28-29 October.

WTO Disputes: Few TRIPS-Related

On TRIPS-related disputes, Azevêdo said “the bulk of TRIPS complaints have, in fact, been directed against developed countries, not developing countries.””The seven TRIPS complaints logged in the past five years all originate from developing countries and challenge developed country practices,” he said.

“To date, the TRIPS Agreement has been cited in 7 % of all WTO disputes – 34 complaints in all, relating to 24 separate matters,” he noted, adding that many of these disputes have been settled by mutual agreement.

He said that the TRIPS disputes “have yielded important jurisprudence shedding light on the delicate balance between the protection of IP rights and trade liberalization, and public policy questions.”

Azevêdo remarked on the “true partnership” of the WTO with WIPO. “So despite early concerns that the international law of IP may become fragmented, or split into two streams, the actual experience with dispute settlement has the opposite outcome,” he said, adding that dispute settlement panels have sought factual information from WIPO about the agreements it governs and their practice.

“IP is increasingly integrated within traded goods and services,” he said, and “responsible for the ‘value added’ in a wide range of high-tech, branded and design-rich products, ranging from smart phones to fashion apparels to traditional food products.”

“Last year,” he said, “reported global exports of IP royalties and licence fees stood at $310 billion US dollars, just short of the combined total of trade in communication, construction and insurance services.”

Image Credits: WTO