By Emma Farge
GENEVA (Reuters) -A World Trade Organization panel rejected on Thursday the European Union’s claims that China had violated the global watchdog’s rules on intellectual property.
The WTO panel concluded that the EU had not demonstrated inconsistencies with WTO rules. However, it did say that China had failed to comply with all WTO transparency obligations.
The European Union filed the complaint against China in 2022, alleging that Chinese courts were preventing European companies from protecting their telecom technology patents, including for 3G, 4G and 5G mobile technology.
It had alleged violations of the WTO’s agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights.
The EU successfully proved to the panel that China had an unwritten policy allowing courts to issue Anti-Suit injunctions (ASI) orders that stopped parties from pursuing related cases in foreign courts.
However, the EU did not prove that this policy violated specific parts of the WTO’s intellectual property rules. The panel also did not find evidence that Chinese courts were unfair or inconsistent in applying the law.
China did, however, violate its transparency obligations by not publishing a final judicial decision involving a Chinese smartphone maker and a U.S.-based company that owns patents for 3G, 4G and 5G mobile technology, a Geneva-based trade source confirmed to Reuters. The panel said China also should have responded to some the EU’s requests for information.
The findings were already shared with the parties in February, but have not been made public until now. The EU has publicly said it will appeal against the result.
The appeal will go to the Multi-Party Appeal Arbitration Arrangement – a surrogate for the WTO’s Appellate Body which was shuttered in 2019 after the United States repeatedly blocked judge appointments.
China confirmed on Wednesday it had received the EU’s appeal and will handle the matter according to relevant rules, its commerce ministry said.
China will work with other participants under the arbitration arrangement to firmly uphold the rules-based multilateral trading system, it said.
(Reporting by Emma Farge; additional reporting Olivia Le Poidevin, Editing by Christoph Steitz, William Maclean)
