Traditional terms : teetering between the TRIPS and TBT agreements

Abstract

On June 26 2008, the Delegation of Argentina issued a statement to the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Committee of the World Trade Organization (WTO) which questioned the utilization of traditional expressions or additional quality terms with respect to wines that the Commission Regulations (EC) No 753/2002 and No 316/2004 of the European Union (EU) foresee. In this statement, Argentina claimed the rejection of its wines in Europe because the label contained certain terms that were protected by the cited EU regulations as exclusive rights to be used in Spanish by the Kingdom of Spain. The Republic of Argentina argued that, as terms referring to a certain product or quality features, they do not fall under the scope of Trade-Related aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS). Such regulations constitute a virtual “expropriation” of a generic term in the Spanish language. Likewise, they are not a measure that is consistent with the Technical Barriers to Trade (TBT) Agreement as they create an unnecessary and unjustified barrier to international trade and therefore, Argentina requested the revision of the mentioned European regulations.