SLUGGISH START TO WIPO TALKS ON IMPLEMENTING DEVELOPMENT AGENDA RECOMMENDATIONS

Progress was slow during the first meeting of the World Intellectual Property Organisation's newly-minted committee on development issues, as officials managed to discuss how to implement only six of some 45 reform proposals aimed at placing development concerns at the heart of the institution's work.

The sluggish pace of the 3-7 March discussions prompted one developing country delegate to worry that the talks might become bogged down in committee deliberations, as has happened to other issues at WIPO. Another official, from an industrialised country, noted that the process would have to be a long-term one anyway.

WIPO members created the Committee on Development and Intellectual Property (CDIP) last fall, and charged it with developing a work programme for implementing and monitoring some 45 recommendations agreed on after two years of intense debates on the establishment of a 'development agenda' for WIPO. Barbadian Ambassador Trevor Clarke was elected to chair the committee.

The 45 development agenda recommendations cover issues such as technical assistance; ensuring that WIPO norm-setting reflects countries' different development levels, and broadening the institution's focus on issues including public domain, competition, and access to knowledge. They also address technology transfer, assessment and evaluation, and the organisation's mandate and governance. Nineteen of the 45 were identified for immediate implementation since they would not require additional human and financial resources. The resources required to implement the remaining 26 need yet to be evaluated. Governments were unable to agree on WIPO's budget, last year as it became the subject of a row related to the organisation's leadership (see BRIDGES Weekly, 3 October 2007).

The six recommendations discussed at the meeting dealt primarily with making the WIPO secretariat's technical assistance more responsive to the concerns and needs of the developing country recipients, Some focused on helping countries boost the capacity of national-level intellectual property authorities to pursue the public interest and to better carry out patent searches.
At the outset of the meeting, several developing countries, in particular the African Group and the 'Friends of Development' group that backed the development agenda from the outset, emphasised that the implementation of the recommendations was even more important than the negotiation phase.

India affirmed that the real challenge was effectively mainstreaming the development dimension in all of WIPO's activities, a task which went well beyond the recommendations.
Many developing countries stressed the need for a holistic approach to implementation, saying that the CDIP should discuss and propose activities for all the 45 recommendations.
The US said that the CDIP must implement proposals in a manner consistent with its specific mandate and the general mandate of WIPO, and specifically with the organisation's regular budgetary procedures. It called for information to be provided immediately for proposals that require additional financial and human resources.

Slovenia, in the name of the EU, insisted that the committee's work programme could not be approved without an examination of similar information for proposals requiring additional financial and human resources.

A number of international organisations and civil society groups also spoke at the meeting. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), said it was willing to contribute to the work of the CDIP, drawing on the work of UN human rights bodies that have addressed the impact of intellectual property policies on various human rights.
Non-governmental organisations such as Knowledge Ecology International (KEI), Electronic Information for Libraries (eifl), the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Third World Network (TWN) made observations about how to improve transparency and balance in WIPO's technical assistance activities. They also suggested how WIPO could expand its work on public interest and development aspects in relation to intellectual property, such as improving access to knowledge and expanding the public domain.

Following lengthy discussions on procedures and working methods, the committee agreed to address the recommendations one by one, and by each of the six clusters, starting first with the 26 recommendations requiring additional resources, and then the 19 for immediate implementation.

The discussions were based on a number of documents circulated at the meeting, notably the chair's preliminary implementation report describing activities implemented or planned by the WIPO Secretariat with respect to the 19 recommendations identified for immediate implementation, and an initial working document containing a list of the Secretariat's proposals for implementing the remaining 26.

Different countries and groups also put forward suggestions for how the recommendations could be implemented; these included the Friends of Development, the Central European and Baltic States, and the Republic of Korea.

Ultimately, the committee was only able to discuss six recommendations in a single cluster, technical assistance. Five were in the list of 26 (recommendations 2, 5, 8, 9 and 10), and one in the list of 19 (recommendation 1),

At the end of the meeting, the CDIP agreed that for the list of 26 recommendations, the proposed activities, with appropriate modifications, would be sent to the Secretariat for an assessment of human and financial resource requirements before the committee's next session in July. For the list of 19 recommendations, the WIPO Secretariat is now set to furnish a progress report to that meeting, taking into consideration suggested changes and new activities.

Given the slow progress made at this first session, the CDIP decided that the chair would organise informal consultations before the next session in July. These would focus particularly on the recommendations that need additional resources in order to enable the secretariat to make the necessary assessments.

Commenting on the meeting, several delegates noted that the chair's initial working papers had been circulated a short time before the meeting, leaving member states insufficient time to react to them. Many countries seemed not to have been adequately prepared to provide concrete suggestions for activities to implement the development agenda recommendations.
Many developing countries said that the Secretariat's list appeared to be confined to activities it had already undertaken or planned, often without a clear link to the goal of achieving a more balanced, inclusive and development oriented intellectual property system -- the ultimate purpose of the development agenda.

Brazil emphasised that it was not the task of the CDIP to give a "certificate of development agenda compliance" to ongoing activities. Instead, it said that the committee should focus on proposals for future work that would orient WIPO activities towards fulfilling the development agenda's goals.

A delegate from another member of the Friends of Development group expressed concern that the CDIP deliberations might end up like discussions in WIPO's Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore, which have been bogged down in conceptual disagreements and semantic arguments for over seven years.

Many delegates expressed hope that the informal consultations by the chair would help accelerate the development agenda discussions.

ICTSD reporting.