News & Commentary
Short posts on new WTO panel reports, legislative developments, academic debates, and current issues in international intellectual property law.
When the WTO's 14th Ministerial Conference closed in Yaoundé, Cameroon in March 2026, the moratorium on non-violation and situation complaints under TRIPS lapsed for the first time since 1995. After more than two decades of successive extensions, WTO Members did not renew it. This post examines what the expiry means legally, why it matters for IP policy and regulatory autonomy, and what the pathway back to Geneva may look like.
Read post →At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the debate over a TRIPS waiver for vaccine-related intellectual property rights became one of the most charged questions in international trade law. This guest post for the IPKat argues that framing the debate as simply "for or against" misses the point: the real question is what kind of waiver, covering which rights, for which purposes, and for how long. The post examines four key issues that any waiver would need to address — patent disclosure, know-how transfer, manufacturing capacity, and the role of voluntary licensing — and asks what the waiver debate reveals about the future of pharmaceutical innovation and access to medicines.
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