A Half Victory for the Global South?

The recently adopted World Intellectual Property Organization Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge has been hailed for achieving the best possible compromise between the interests of the global South and North. It brings into force for the first time an international obligation mandating disclosure of the genetic resources and/or associated traditional knowledge used in a patent application. Weaknesses in the treaty may undermine the gains of other treaties while having a detrimental effect on the domestic efforts of countries, like India, which have worked hard to incorporate justice and equity in the intellectual property regime.

The author would like to express her sincere gratitude to the anonymous reviewer whose comments helped in enhancing the rigour of the article.

An international legal instrument—the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge, hailed as historic, groundbreaking, and a success for multilateralism (WIPO 2024a)—was adopted through consensus at the Diplomatic Conference held in May 2024 at Geneva. Organised under the aegis of the WIPO, a specialised agency of the United Nations (UN), the conference marked the culmination of 25 years of work in WIPO’s Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and Folklore (IGC-GRTKF) at the interface of the intellectual property regime with genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. After many years of stalled negotiations and a hiatus, momentum for such an instrument started building up in July 2022 in the 55th session of the WIPO General Assembly followed by a special session of the IGC-GRTKF in September 2023 where a preparatory committee met to establish the necessary modalities of the conference. The preparatory committee also approved the draft text of the proposed legal instrument, which builds on a text initially prepared by Ian Goss as the chair of the IGC and originally tabled in the
IGC-GRTKF’s 43rd session in June 2022.

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A Half Victory for the Global South?

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