Presentation Overview
Trade and investment agreements often contain commitments that oblige signatories to make significant changes to their intellectual property (IP) policies and practices. This seminar will examine the policy space available to developing countries to better align their IP policies to their national development needs in light of the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade-related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) and various preferential trade and investment agreements that go beyond the minimum standards of the TRIPS Agreement. The speaker will draw upon his nine years of experience leading the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development's Intellectual Property programme, which provides request-based policy advice and legal training to developing countries on IP and cross-cutting development issues such as access to medicines, access to genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge, competition and technology transfer.
Simplified personal history
Kiyoshi Adachi is Chief of the Intellectual Property Unit of the Division on Investment and Enterprise at the Geneva-based United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Since 2006, Mr. Adachi has led a team of professionals at UNCTAD looking into the integrated treatment of intellectual property and development issues, and has published and lectured widely on this interface (including at UNCTAD workshops, the WIPO Academy, the United Nations University, CEIPI/University of Strasbourg and the SIPO Training Institute in Beijing, among others). He has advised and trained stakeholders in a number of developing countries in Asia and Africa on policy issues relating to intellectual property, local manufacturing of and access to medicines, the relationship between intellectual property and access and benefit sharing policies under the Nagoya Protocol/Convention on Biological Diversity, as well as on intellectual property provisions in preferential trade and investment agreements.
Prior to joining UNCTAD, he worked with the United Nations in both New York and Vienna, and as an attorney with an international law firm in Tokyo. Mr. Adachi holds a Juris Doctor from the UCLA School of Law in Los Angeles and is admitted to the bars of Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia, USA. He also has a Master of Public Administration concentrating in development management from the American University in Washington, D.C. and a Bachelor’s degree in Government and Asian Studies from Dartmouth College. He is currently a visiting scholar at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies (GRIPS) in Tokyo, where he is conducting research on the extent to which developing countries are conscious of policy bias when requesting technical advice from international organizations on controversial trade and investment-related issues, and the degree to which such policy bias may be reflected in the published advisory reports of public intergovernmental organizations offering such advisory services.