On Tuesday, 25 February 2014, Bangladesh delivered the following statement at the WTO TRIPS Council on Non-Violation and Situation Complaints.
On agenda item of non-violation and situation complaints
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
I take this opportunity to thank the Secretariat for yesterday’s very useful briefing. The delegation of Bangladesh believes that the legal grounds for non-violation and situation complaints under TRIPS are very weak. Probably that’s why all the membership unanimously extended the moratorium several times. As far as the history and statistics are concerned, we find very few instances where non-violation disputes were brought before the WTO with even fewer record of success for this type of cases. Developing countries and especially LDCs are particularly concerned as they enjoy different flexibilities under TRIPS and any one of them could also be a subject of non-violation complaint quite unnecessarily. We thank the delegation of Switzerland to mention this in their statement but we still have lots of uncertainty as we did not discuss it thoroughly. We further draw everybody’s attention not to consider TRIPS Agreement as other market access agreements. So we consider that application of non-violation and situation complaints under TRIPS Agreement will not be reasonable and prudent.