Seventh Pan-African ABS Workshop

Natural Justice’s Lassana Kone and Gino Cocchiaro are attending the seventh Pan-African Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) Workshop hosted by South Africa’s Department of Environmental Affairs from 25 February to 1 March 2013 in Phalaborwa, South Africa. 

The main objectives of the workshop are to collect reflections and comments on the draft AU Guidelines regarding its use and usefulness, consider the “Traditional Knowledge and Plant Genetic Resources Guidelines” developed by SANBio/NEPAD, reflect on the outcomes of the workshop on traditional knowledge in Bangalore, India, and discuss questions regarding the documentation, valorization and compliance of traditional knowledge. 

The workshop was officially opened on 25 February by the Minister of Water and Environmental Affairs Edna Molewa. She also made a symbolic handover of the second royalty payment to the National Traditional Healer’s Committee. The donors to the ABS Capacity Development Initiative, including the German Embassy, the Danish Ministry of the Environment, the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Institut de la Francophonie pour le Developpement Durable and the African Union Commission also addressed the assembly. 

In the opening address, Dr Andreas Drews of the ABS Capacity Development Initiative stressed that the expected outcomes of the workshop are to share experiences, reflect and comment on the draft AU Guidelines, and identify the challenges and recommendations for the future work under the ABS Initiative on the linkages between ABS, traditional knowledge and intellectual property rights for effective national implementation of the Nagoya Protocol. There will also be an opportunity to discuss the draft EU regulation for implementing the Nagoya Protocol.

Policy Brief on IPRs and Rio +20

In the aftermath of the United Nations Convention on Sustainable Development (Rio +20), Ahmed Abdel Latif of the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development has prepared a policy brief entitled ‘Intellectual Property Rights and Green Technologies from Rio to Rio: An Impossible Dialogue?’ The brief considers the absence of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) out of Rio +20 relative to the 1992 Conference on Sustainable Development. It examines why common ground was not found at Rio +20. 

The brief “seeks to answer these questions by examining the evolution of the global debate on IPRs and green technologies from the Earth Summit in 1992 to Rio+20. It then makes some suggestions about how to foster a more constructive dialogue on this issue in the aftermath of the Rio+20 Summit.” 

The brief can be downloaded here.

Expert Meeting on ABS and IPRs

Johanna von Braun and Sabine Zajderman (Natural Justice) attended the Expert Meeting on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) and Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) from 5-9 September in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The meeting was organized by the ABS Capacity Development Initiative for Africa (ABS Initiative) in cooperation with the Ethiopian Institute of Biodiversity Conservation.

This was the first meeting discussing ABS implementation in light of the Nagoya Protocol and its links to IPRs in the African context. The workshop aimed to provide a dialogue platform for representatives from African countries and international IPR experts to explore the challenges of linking ABS and IPRs in a coherent manner when implementing ABS at the national and sub-regional levels. Concrete practical experiences on ABS cases linked to IPRs were presented and formed the basis of intensive discussions.