Commissioner Malmström’s Response to Civil Society Concerns Over the Third Country Report on the Protection of IPRs
On 16 April 2018, KEI Europe and 32 groups wrote a letter to the European Commission’s Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, expressing concerns over the Commission’s plans to create an EU Watch List. In the letter, we noted that although the European Union has publicly committed its commitment to support the right of third countries to use the public health safeguards of the WTO TRIPS Agreement, the “Third Country Report on the protection and enforcement of intellectual property rights in third countries” challenged these very safeguards by targeting third countries for enacting policies on: 1) strict patentability criteria (Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, and Russia), 2) local working provisions (Ecuador and Indonesia), and 3) compulsory licensing (Ecuador,India and Ukraine).
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