Proposals from Japan and South Korea would require patent law changes in several RCEP countries, including Indonesia.
The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which was launched in November 2012, is currently under negotiation between ASEAN member states and their key dialogue partners (China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand), and has attracted headlines worldwide as among the key trading arrangements currently being negotiated.
This mega-regional trade agreement, covering around 40 percent of global GDP and a two-thirds of world trade, is regarded as “beyond WTO trade deals.” The RCEP, in this regard, does not only cover market access for trade agendas that have also been negotiating under the current Doha Round trade negotiations but it has an even higher standard for those aspects. Some controversial trade agendas which were postponed for an indefinite period in the WTO trade negotiations, such as government procurement, state-owned enterprises, intellectual property rights, e-commerce, competition policy and also investment, managed to find their way into the RCEP talks. The RCEP negotiations also integrate non-WTO trade agendas such as provisions regarding small-medium enterprises and also Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).
Among the issues being negotiated, intellectual property (IP) provisions are of particular concern for public health due to higher levels of protection which delay the market entry of generic medicines, translating to higher costs to governments and reduced access to essential medicines. In the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement, developed countries secured substantial TRIPS-Plus provisions including broadening the scope of patentability, patent term extension, data exclusivity, patent linkage, and stringent enforcement measures.
Leaked RCEP proposals by Japan and South Korea dated October 3,2014, indicated that these countries were seeking to elevate IP standard within RCEP to levels akin to those in the TPP. A more recently leaked composite draft of the RCEP IP chapter (dated October 15,2015) showed that some of the Japanese and Korean proposals remained, at that time, under consideration and likely to be contested by at least some participants. However, the sheer magnitude of the economies of these two countries is such that they could shift the center of gravity within the negotiations in the direction of IP rights, especially given that seven of the 16 RCEP countries have recently signed up to unprecedented IP monopoly rights in the TPP.
