Implementating the Agreement on Trade – Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights in Vietnam – Thanh Thi KIEU

This is a mapping of WTO members‟ obligations under TRIPs against the national laws of Vietnam implementing those obligations. Vietnam has produced comprehensive substantive laws harmonizing its intellectual property laws with the intellectual property laws of the international community. These substantive laws are complemented by procedural laws also required by TRIPs for the enforcement of intellectual property rights. The analysis focuses on how flexibilities within the obligations under TRIPs have been exercised by Vietnam to adapt those obligations to meet its own circumstances as a developing country. It seeks to frame the flexibilities within the wider context of the problems of law, sometimes overlooked in transplant of law analysis, including the ambiguity of language, conflicting rules of interpretation, lack of comprehensiveness, unpredictable technological and social change, and the limitations on law and policy makers including lack of knowledge and experience and conflicts between them over policies which are not resolved in the legal text. These are exacerbated where law is transposed from other national legal systems, through international law, into ones with differences in traditions and culture such as Vietnam. Its agricultural, Confucian, Buddhist and socialist heritage neither valued nor saw the products of human creativity as individually owned property. Vietnam has not always chosen to use the flexibilities within TRIPs to make laws appropriate to its economic and social situation. The generality of its national law creates ambiguities and gaps making it difficult for administrators and judges to apply in the absence of further administrative regulation or guidance on its implementation. The failure to fill these gaps reflects the reality that although the law is comprehensive Vietnamese law and policy makers are not sufficiently familiar with policies relating such laws to levels of development or with their practical application. 

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