TWN Info Service on Intellectual Property Issues (Feb08/01)

12 February 2008


Please find below a news report on a press conference held by NGOs attending the 6th meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-Ended Working Group on Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) of the CBD.

It was first published in SUNS #6401 Monday 28 January 2008 and is reproduced here with permission.

Best Wishes
Sangeeta Shashikant
Third World Network
email: ssangeeta@myjaring.net

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NGOS CALL FOR LEGALLY-BINDING ABS REGIME

Published in SUNS #6401 Monday 28 January 2008

Geneva, 25 Jan (Kanaga Raja) -- Non-governmental organizations attending the sixth meeting of the Ad Hoc Open-ended Working Group on Access and Benefit-Sharing (ABS) of the Convention on Biological Diversity have called for a legally-binding international regime on access to genetic resources and the equitable sharing of the benefits arising from their use.

The sixth meeting of the Ad Hoc Working Group took place from 22-25 January and continued discussions of the fifth meeting of the group at Montreal in October 2007.

The Ad Hoc Working Group has been mandated to elaborate and negotiate an international regime for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising out of the utilization of genetic resources with the aim of adopting an instrument or instruments to amongst others effectively implement the provisions of Article 13 and Article 8 (j) of the Convention.

This is the last substantive meeting of the Working Group before the ninth Conference of Parties (COP).

At a press briefing Friday, Francois Meienberg of the Berne Declaration said that Access and Benefit Sharing (ABS) is one of the three pillars of the CBD - the others being conservation and sustainable use.

"It is quite clear that without this ABS, or to say in other words, without justice, the whole house could not stand," he said, adding that "we need justice and we need access and benefit sharing."

He noted that since the CBD came into force in 1993, benefit sharing has not been implemented. There is nothing going from the user countries – from pharmaceutical companies and so on - to the providers of genetic resources who are in most cases in the global South.

Citing the adoption of voluntary guidelines on ABS in 2002 (the Bonn guidelines), he said that it was quite clear that this cannot be the solution.

Voluntary guidelines have not worked, he said, adding that the only way to solve the problem of non-implementation of access and benefit-sharing is to have something really binding.

He also noted that while the working group has been working on a regime on ABS, it must be recognized that nearly nothing has happened (with regards to a text).

He blamed certain Northern countries - especially Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Japan - for blocking the process. These countries have said that they are not ready to negotiate a legally-binding regime on ABS.

At the eighth meeting of the COP in Curitiba in 2006, the working group was requested to complete its work at the earliest possible time before the tenth meeting of the COP, to be held in 2010.

The activist from the Swiss-based organization was of the view that it would seem to be very difficult to reach this target.

Gladman Chibememe from the Africa region indigenous and local community caucus highlighted the issue of capacity-building in Africa. A major issue for indigenous and local communities from Africa is related to traditional knowledge (TK) and capacity building.

"We identify TK as a very essential component of our livelihood and our being and that this TK should become an integral part of the regime," he said.

"If TK is included in the regime, we will have a real stake in the regime because TK is the only mechanism in the regime which may not be manipulated by technology," he added, unlike genetic resources which could be manipulated by genetic engineering.

On capacity building, he emphasized the need to have a sustainable financial mechanism in which local communities would have resources channeled directly to them. He also emphasized the need to have a bottom-up approach in terms of establishing institutions.

"We are calling for a legally binding ABS regime... which should have provisions that identify indigenous and local communities as real and meaningful beneficiaries to the whole process," he said.

Sangeeta Shashikant from Third World Network highlighted the link between the discussions on an ABS regime and discussions taking place this week at the WHO on the issue of influenza virus sharing and benefit sharing.

Providing some background to the issue of avian flu virus sharing, Shashikant noted that world attention had focused on the problem when Indonesia publicly announced that it would no longer provide bird flu viruses to the WHO Global Influenza Surveillance Network (GISN), as the system was unfair to the interests and needs of developing countries.

Shashikant highlighted that vaccines developed from candidate vaccine viruses obtained from influenza viruses from affected countries are often too costly and unavailable to affected developing countries that need them, while developed countries have entered into advance purchase agreements to book vaccines in the event of a pandemic.

She also noted that the system does not really provide capacity building for developing countries so that they can also in the future do their own risk assessment, as well as get access to required technology.

Shashikant said that one set of clear winners from the WHO system is the commercial vaccine developers which have already obtained contracts from developed countries and have a system where they can get viruses.

Developed countries are the other set of winners because they can afford these vaccines, as they are already signing contracts (with vaccine developers) and are getting free access to the viruses.

On the other hand, she said, developing countries have not gained much from this scheme. The issue of fair and equitable benefit sharing is at the heart of the ABS debate at the CBD.

The concrete case of virus sharing and benefit sharing is one aspect that has to be looked at in the CBD negotiations, she said, adding that some of the crucial issues are the same such as sovereign rights over biological resources and prior informed consent.

Debra Harry from the Indigenous Peoples Council on Bio-Colonialism said that indigenous peoples hold inherent and paramount rights over much of the subject matter, specifically genetic resources and indigenous knowledge, under negotiation in the CBD, and such rights have been recognized in international human rights law, which Parties are obliged to uphold.

Such rights have been clearly articulated in the United Nations Declaration on Indigenous Peoples' rights. It is time for the CBD to advance from 1992 to 2008, she said, adding that the CBD must be interpreted and implemented in accordance with this body of international human rights law.

Carmen Ramirez from Colombia, representing the Latin American indigenous caucus, cited an example in her country where a forest law was recently declared unconstitutional in the Constitutional Court as it did not take into account the prior informed consent of indigenous communities.

This is a very important example in a country like Colombia which is approving and ratifying all conventions and customary international law but which has not applied them in internal laws, she said. +