A/70/279 17. The international perspective regarding patent protection has shifted over time. During the nineteenth century, the desirability of patent protection was not uniformly viewed even among industrialized countries. During the 1960s and 1970s, newly independent States and developing countries widely concurred on the need to limit patent protection in order to promote technology transfer at affordable prices. Medical and agricultural technologies were excluded from the patent regimes of many countries, including some developed countries, up until the 1990s. Since the 1970s, multinational corporations have lobbied their Governments to push for more muscular intellectual property protection abroad, despite the opposition of developing countries. Although such efforts originally focused on the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), certain industries pushed for Governments to harmonize minimum standards of intellectual property protection in the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade negotiations. The objective was to seek broad geographic coverage of the protection and the effective enforcement of intellectual property rights. 3 18. By 1994, an internationally binding approach to intellectual property rights and their enforcement, based on high standards of protection, had prevailed, notably through the negotiation of the World Trade Organization Agreement on TradeRelated Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Article 27.1 of the TRIPS Agreement specifies that patents shall be available for any invention, whether a product or process, in all fields of technology, provided that it is new, i nvolves an inventive step and is capable of industrial application. 19. The TRIPS Agreement marks a departure from the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property of 1883. It establishes patent protection for a minimum term of 20 years, ignoring the diversity of national needs (see TRIPS Agreement, art. 33). The Paris Convention, and the subsequent agreements that built upon it, gave countries sufficient flexibility to adapt their intellectual property regime in the light of their socio-economic needs and objectives and allowed States to exclude strategic sectors, such as the pharmaceutical and agrochemical industries, from patentability and to determine the length of protection ( A/HRC/11/12, para. 24). 20. The TRIPS Agreement requirements apply to all World Trade Organization (WTO) members, although least developed countries have until at least 2021 to come into compliance, thanks to extended transition periods. It is enforceable through the decisions of the WTO Dispute Settlement Body, backed by the possibility of trade sanctions. 21. Despite considerable limitations, the TRIPS Agreement includes certain safeguards providing some flexibility to limit or even exclude patent protection, including extended transition periods for developing countries. Consequently, corporations and some developed States “have pushed since its inception for a wider and stronger set of standards through add-on agreements, often called TRIPS-Plus treaties or provisions. Such agreements would, for example, limit opposition to patent applications; prohibit national regulatory authorities from approving generic medicines until patents have expired; maintain data exclusivity, thereby delaying the approval of biogeneric drugs; and require new forms of protection, such as __________________ 3 15-12543 See Carlos Correa, “The current system of trade and intellectual property rights”, European Yearbook on International Economic Law, vol. 7, forthcoming. 7/26