Minutes - TRIPS Council - View details of the intervention/statement

Ambassador Karen Tan (Singapore)
J TECHNICAL COOPERATION AND CAPACITY BUILDING
119. The representative of Brazil referred to the statement made by Zambia and said that that was exactly what Brazil had meant in the proposal presented at the Council's last meeting, namely that the specific needs of countries in need of technical cooperation be achieved by these activities. She believed that technical cooperation and capacity building under Article 67 should not only concentrate on implementation of the obligations. To be effective, it should be broader in nature and also teach how to make legitimate use of the flexibilities under the TRIPS Agreement, as well as of its provisions related to transfer of technology and mitigation of abuse of intellectual property rights. 120. To achieve that goal, Brazil had suggested that the 14 proposals in "Cluster A" of the WIPO Development Agenda could provide a useful guiding framework in making Article 67 more responsive to developing country specific needs. At the Council's last meeting, Brazil had presented in document IP/C/W/153/Add.1 a form of stock taking of capacity building activities regarding a project development in Mozambique on sanitary controls related to pharmaceuticals in which all these 14 recommendations had been observed. By doing so, it had expected to overcome the resistance of a few countries that opposed its proposal on that matter. She hoped that, since that meeting, delegations had had enough time to analyse this form, and that the present meeting could agree that Members should take into consideration these 14 recommendations when providing technical cooperation under Article 67. 121. She said that, at the last meeting, the representative of Egypt, speaking on behalf of the African Group, had listed the following principles, which, in the view of that Group, should govern technical cooperation activities under Article 67: technical and financial cooperation needed to be (i) development-oriented, demand-driven and transparent, taking into account the priorities and special needs of developing countries, especially LDCs, as well as the different levels of development of Members; (ii) promote a development-oriented intellectual property culture; (iii) place particular emphasis on the needs of small and medium-sized enterprises and institutions dealing with a specific research and cultural industry; (iv) promote measures that would help countries deal with intellectual property-related anti-competitive practice by providing technical cooperation to the developing countries, especially LDCs at their request in order to better understand the interface between IP rights and competition policy; (v) further develop infrastructure and other technical facilities with a view to making international intellectual property institutions more efficient and more fairly-balanced between intellectual property protection and the public interest; (vi) strengthen national capacity for the protection of domestic creations, innovations and inventions and support the development of national and specific and technological infrastructure; and (vii) mainstream development considerations. Brazil endorsed such principles as a minimal base for consensus.
IP/C/M/62