Bandung Declaration on
Protecting Asian-African Nations’
Intellectual Property Rights
Pending
the meeting of the Inter-Governmental Committee on
Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge, and
Folklore (IGC GRTKF), to be held at WIPO
Headquarters in Geneva on July 2007, an
Asian-African forum on GRTKF met in Bandung on June
18-20, 2007.
One of the main objectives of the forum’s meeting
was to synchronize the Asian-African position on and
formulate a common strategy for IGC GRTKF.
A
follow-up of the Asian-African Summit and the NAASP
agreement in Jakarta in 2005, the meeting produced
an Asian-African joint declaration, the Bandung
Declaration about Expression of Traditional Culture,
Traditional Knowledge, and Genetic Resources”. It
stressed the importance of the right of states to
genetic resources, knowledge, and traditional
cultural expressions as their national assets with
social, cultural, and economic values. It saw a
necessity to accelerate the process of formulating a
law as a binding instrument for preserving one’s
heritage of traditional property in order to avoid
all forms of abuse.
Through the Asian-African forum, participating
countries will strive for intense discussion in
various international for a on the forming of the
GRTKF protection mechanism. They will strengthen
coordination and cooperation among themselves in
their effort to preserve, protect, and promote GRTKF.
In that connection, all participants of the forum
agreed to the necessity of taking steps to create
legislation that would protect the GRTKF on the
international and national levels for the
Asian-African countries.
Speakers and international experts who attended the
three day AA Forum on GRTKF discussed their
experiences in dealing with the conservation,
protection, and promotion of genetic resources,
knowledge, and traditional cultural expression.
They also discussed the development of the GRTKF
issue in the WIPO forum and the form of the
protection of intellectual property, which should be
effective for the GRTKF of the Asian-African
countries. The speakers and international experts
came from, among others, the WIPO, the African
intellectual property rights organization ARIPO,
South Africa, China, and Norway.
The meeting, with 47 participating members of the
New Asian-African Strategic Partnership (NAASP), was
organized by Indonesia’s ministries of foreign
affairs and of law and human rights, together with
the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).
