"TRIPS-Plus" Provisions
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By: Ami Vitale/Oxfam |
The US Trade Representative (USTR), in response to pressure from domestic industry lobbies, is seeking to extend the intellectual property (IP) protections offered under TRIPS. It has pressured trading partners to agree to provisions in regional and bilateral trade agreements that mandate even higher levels of IP protection than those they agreed to under TRIPS. Developing countries are thus required under these trade agreements to include very high levels of protection in their national laws, with grave consequences for public health and other national policy objectives. The US-Singapore Free Trade Agreement negotiated in early 2003 has several provisions that illustrate this problem.
The US Trade Representative also has a practice of bullying countries that it feels do not offer adequate levels of protection for US companies' intellectual property. In response to industry complaints, the USTR pressures countries bilaterally, in some cases even threatening or imposing trade sanctions against them. There is already a multilateral WTO Agreement governing intellectual property (TRIPS), which was concluded after much wrangling over how to balance innovators' rights and broader social interests. Seeking to tip the balance in favor of US-based corporations by pressuring poor countries to adopt higher IP protection outside of the multilateral system is unfair, inappropriate, and even immoral in light of the grave public health crises affecting the developing world.