06/11/2019 - China-EU: conclusion of the stand-alone GIs Agreement negotiations

On 6 November, China and the EU concluded the negotiations on a stand-alone GIs agreement, which will protect 100 European GIs in China and 100 Chinese GIs in the EU.

The Agreement (please note that this is not the final version, which should be made public in the following days,) provides for solid GIs rules, together with a limited number of exceptions to the full protection. The text – which will now go through legal scrutiny from both sides – is expected to enter into force before the end of 2020. Four years after its entry into force, it will expand to cover an additional 175 GI names from both sides. These names will have to follow the same registration procedure than the 100 names already covered by the agreement.

This summary has been extracted from an "oriGIn Alert", which is a service reserved exclusively to oriGIn members.  Click here to join oriGIn 

For more information about bilateral and plurilateral agreements covering GIs see the concerning category in the section Policy and Advocacy