TRIPs-Plus Treaties and Strengthening Protection of Pharmaceutical Inventions

After concluding TRIPs agreement, the sphere of negotiation in respect of protecting new kinds of intellectual property rights especially pharmaceutical inventions transferred to bilateral and regional arrangements. TRIPs agreement has some flexibility to attract all countries. Industrialized countries believed that multilateral agreements protections based especially in regard of pharmaceutical inventions are not fairly enough and because of this, they are searching new stage to negotiate and apply their views. This evolution occurred in pursuance of industrialized countries endeavors to protect their national’s intellectual property rights abroad. In recent years industrialized countries began to negotiate bilateral agreements with their trading partners. Some of these agreements are concluding in trade and investment field but also contain important provisions about intellectual property rights including pharmaceutical inventions, while others directly aim at intellectual property rights. Standards of these treaties prevail those of multilateral agreements such as TRIPs and because of this, these treaties are known as TRIPs-plus treaties. Industrialized countries in TRIPs-plus protection from pharmaceutical inventions focus on several points in their bilateral and regional negotiations such as identifying new types of intellectual property rights, taking TRIPs-plus standards in intellectual property protection and setting limits on existing flexibilities in TRIPs agreement. In this article we study the concept and scope of TRIPs-plus rules in the realm of pharmaceutical inventions. We will also show that standards of these types of treaties go further than those of multilateral intellectual property treaties such as TRIPs.