TRIPS Agreement: From Minimum Standards to Double Standards of Intellectual Property Rights Protection in North-South Relations

The WTO Trips agreement's basic objective of establishing minimum international standards for IP rights protection is based on a restrictive " one-fits-all " approach that denies the right to enact or not to enact intellectual property rights provisions to developing countries and least developed countries and restrict their ability to effectively adapt national laws to their own socioeconomic environment and development level. Developed countries had widely benefited from this privilege when no minimum binding standards of intellectual property existed in multilateral relations. The Trips agreement stabilizes the strong inequalities in terms of bargaining power between rich and poor countries ; it also reinforces the pressure exerted by US big business firms during the negotiation process to universalize the western system of IP rights to the detriment of indigenous communities' intellectual property rights. In practice, the Trips agreement illustrates how an international agreement is to facilitate biopiracy by protecting rich countries' inventions and ignoring those from the poor ones