WIPO Provides Unprecedented Global Access to African IP Judgments from OAPI Countries
March 24, 2023
The most significant judicial decisions on IP from countries that make up the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI) have for the first time become freely accessible to a global audience, in both English and French, through the publication of the latest volume of the WIPO Collection of Leading Judgments on IP Rights.
This new volume, which covers judgments issued by the courts of OAPI Members between 1997 and 2018, is the result of a collaboration between WIPO and the Organisation Africaine de la Propriété Intellectuelle (OAPI) to respond to the need for information on IP jurisprudence from the countries of the OAPI region that are unified by the common IP legislative framework of the Bangui Agreement.
The publication guides readers through 53 judgments selected by IP experts from the region as leading decisions in the areas of patents, trademarks, industrial designs, trade names, copyright and unfair competition. Readers can also benefit from insightful commentaries provided by the renowned authors: Judge Max Lambert Ndéma Elongué, Dr. Joseph Fometeu, Judge Malick Lamotte, Judge Aristide Fade, Dr. Grégoire Jiogue and Dr. André Lucas.
The Collection seeks to encourage conversation and exchange with a view to enhancing judicial analysis, reasoning and decision-making. We trust that the insightful judicial analysis provided in these pages will assist judges in their role of achieving an effective and balanced IP ecosystem, in the OAPI region and elsewhere.
Marco M. Alemán, Assistant Director General, IP and Innovation Ecosystems Sector, WIPO
It is a unique piece of work, the first compendium of landmark judgments ever published in the OAPI region. The message that I hope is transmitted by this initiative is that IP rights are well protected in the OAPI region, thereby making it attractive economically from a rights standpoint.
Denis L. Bohoussou, Director General, OAPI
The full text of the judgments in French, with the option of machine translation for additional languages, is available in WIPO Lex, an online database that provides free access to legal information on IP from around the world.
This is the second volume in the WIPO Collection of Leading Judgments on IP Rights, a series launched by the WIPO Judicial Institute to give the global IP community access to landmark judgments from jurisdictions that are among the most dynamic litigation venues or whose jurisprudence is not readily available to an international audience, through a succession of volumes that illustrate IP adjudication approaches and trends by jurisdiction or by theme.
In the same series:
- People’s Republic of China (2011–2018) (Chinese and English)
About the WIPO Judicial Institute
The WIPO Judicial Institute is a global center for dialogue, education and support on IP for judiciaries. The Institute works with national and regional judicial authorities from around the world to create spaces for exchange of information and practices, to deliver capacity-building activities, to produce in-depth resources on topics of relevance to the global judiciary, and to provide free and open access to IP-related legal knowledge to everyone through the WIPO Lex database.
The Institute is a part of WIPO’s IP and Innovation Ecosystems Sector, which supports Member States in developing their IP and innovation ecosystems to drive economic growth.
About WIPO Lex
WIPO Lex is a database that contributes to providing IP-related knowledge to a wide general audience by offering a free online portal to 48,000 national, regional and international legal documents, including IP treaties, laws and judgments.