Challenging the international regime dealing with "Indigenous Knowledge", India, along with Peru, Kenya, Australia, New Zealand, Venezuela and Colombia, submitted a 10-point recommendation at the Unctad conference on "Protecting Traditional Knowledge, Innovations and Practices" held at Geneva last week.

Speaking on behalf of India, Dr Suman Sahai, convenor of NGO Gene Campaign, told the conference that indigenous people and local communities had a holistic relationship with the natural world that extended well beyond pure economic interests and that they had a fundamental right to the practice of their culture and therefore to use their customary laws to maintain and protect indigenous knowledge.

According to a Gene Campaign release, the group of countries demanded that priority must be given to the strengthening of existing customary laws and value systems of indigenous people and local communities in the protection of traditional knowledge.

They said the current Intellectual Property Rights system was unsuited and inappropriate for the recognition and protection to traditional knowledge systems because of inherent conflicts between the two systems. Indigenous people, the group said, had a fundamental right to participate in decision-making processes that affect their well-being and this had been accepted by a number of UN agencies. However, the IPR system does not allow any space for local communities to have a say, it added.

Noting that traditional rights were holistic and had been developed and held collectively, the conference was told that IPR was founded on private, economic rights, whereas traditional knowledge systems included both rights to use and obligations to respect and protect the natural world. While IPR was protected within legal systems of the world, traditional knowledge systems were largely unrecognised and unprotected within legal systems, the countries said.

Among their list of demands the countries, all of which were home to traditional communities, called for a ban on patenting of life forms as well as inclusion of social, cultural, economic and spiritual values in the development of protective mechanisms for traditional knowledge.

The submission recommended that a "Council of Traditional People" be established to oversee the development of mechanisms for protection and enhancement of traditional knowledge systems. This, it said, was necessary as the constitutional mandate of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) was the "protection and promotion" of the existing IPR systems which protected the rights of industry and was incompatible with the interests of indigenous people. Noting that the UN should fund and support the proposed council, the member countries said it should also work with all UN agencies that had responsibilities for protection of traditional knowledge.