Six talking points from the year’s final General Council meeting

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED DECEMBER 21, 2023 | UPDATED JANUARY 24, 2024

The World Trade Organization’s General Council had 25 items on the agenda for its last meeting of 2023, several of them with multiple sub-items. Most are — frankly — boring although essential for the record of WTO operations.

But some points were worth discussing from the meeting, which we can extend to include year-end sessions of the Trade Negotiations Committee and Dispute Settlement Body.

Here are six. They won’t hit the headlines, except perhaps one, but they do tell us something about the state of play on bigger issues, and where the WTO might be heading, particularly with the February 26–29 Abu Dhabi Ministerial Conference now only two months away.

UPDATES: expanding the WTO intellectual property waiver for COVID-19

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By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED OCTOBER 4, 2022 | UPDATED AS INDICATED

The waiver on patent protection for COVID-19 vaccines was agreed at the WTO Ministerial Conference on June 17, 2022. The text with brief explanations is here. The waiver is not an obligation. Countries can choose to suspend certain patent rights if they want.

Much of the work after the Ministerial Conference results from a provision for WTO members to decide within six months (by December 17, 2022) whether or not to expand the waiver to include COVID-19 tests and treatments:

“No later than six months from the date of this Decision, Members will decide on its extension to cover the production and supply of COVID-19 diagnostics and therapeutics”

Background: The original (revised) proposal; the debate; the proposed compromise and analysis.

Updates on the latest developments will be added here, with links to new documents and news items. That will include any notifications from countries changing their laws to apply the waiver. So far there are none.

Key events

• October 31, 2023 — deadlock continues in the intellectual property council after an information session with stakeholders
• October 23–24, 2023 — discussed by capital-based senior officials: positions are unchanged
• March and May, 2023 — discussed in the General Council but no new deadline set
• December 20, 2022 — the General Council agrees on postponing the deadline with no date set, but to be reconsidered in the Spring
• December 19, 2022 — the General Council postpones a decision on postponing the deadline
• December 17, 2022 — deadline for expansion decision missed, so far no country has moved to use the vaccine patent waiver agreed in June
• December 16, 2022 — formal meeting: chair’s draft binned, replaced by short paragraph postponing the deadline
• December 7, 2022 — chair’s draft factual report circulated
• December 6, 2022 — informal meeting discusses proponents’ draft and postponing deadline
• December 5–6, 2022 — US announces it will need time to consult stakeholders
• November 2, 2022 — informal meeting, with members’ positions on expanding the waiver to tests and treatments crystallised into three groups
• July 6, 2022 — first meeting after the vaccine patent waiver decision, followed by stock-taking and informal meetings

(TRIPS = trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights, the official description of intellectual property issues that are discussed in the WTO — they should be “trade-related” issues)

One to watch: Bolivia’s bid to import a Canadian COVID-19 vaccine

By Peter Ungphakorn
POSTED MAY 12, 2021 | UPDATED MAY 12, 2021

News broke late yesterday (May 11, 2021) that a Canadian company, Biolyse Pharma, had agreed to supply Bolivia with 15 million doses of Johnson & Johnson’s Janssen vaccine for COVID-19, without the patent-owner’s permission.

But the deal cannot go ahead until the Canadian government issues a “compulsory licence” for Biolyse Pharma to make the vaccine in Canada and export it to Bolivia.

Although the objective is to get a cheaper version of the vaccine to a developing country — Bolivia — a lot of the focus will be on Canada, which now holds the key.