NAFTA dispute panel arbitrators are reported to have issued a decision in the dispute brought by Eli Lilly against the government of Canada, though the decision has not been made public yet. Lilly had alleged that Canada’s patentability requirements had an overly high standard of what was considered ‘useful’, causing it to lose patent cases, and that this had violated NAFTA’s requirement that each country grant patents on inventions that “are new, result from an inventive step and are capable of industrial application.”
On Friday, the Investment Arbitration Reporter published a story saying that “a unanimous award was rendered on March 16, 2017, with arbitrators dismissing the claims on their merits,” and ordering Eli Lilly to pay $5 million of Canada’s legal fees.
For more details about the original case, and for Eli Lilly’s Notice of Arbitration, please see my earlier post on this dispute.
