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Biodiversity rights legislation
Collection of adopted and draft legislation covering biodiversity, genetic resources and traditional knowledge
Authors:
; GRAIN
Publisher:
GRAIN, 2002
Biodiversity Rights Legislation (BRL) is a collection of emerging laws that directly affect people's control over agricultural biodiversity in developing countries. It compiles those legislative texts that define rights in relation to genetic resources or to the knowledge associated with those materials. They may be rights of ownership, intellectual property, stewardship, access, sovereignty or something else.
The BRL includes both draft and adopted legislation. However, drafts are only incorporated with the explicit approval of a relevant source.
There are two ways of accessing the materials:
By country: The country is clustered according to region:
- Africa and the Middle East
- Asia and Pacific
- Latin America and Caribbean
By type of law: Legislation is clustered according to what kind of rights they actually provide for. Allthough they all grant some kind of rights over biodiversity, the laws have highly different objectives.
There are five broad categories, which can be further subdivided:
- Patents & sui generis plant variety protection: the minimum standards of TRIPS
- TRIPS-plus
- Broader biodiversity laws : Access, benefit sharing and beyond
- Traditional knowledge: the latest IPR trap
- Alternative regimes: non-IPR community rights
