Biogenetic Resources and Indigenous Peoples’ Rights

The present schemes of intellectual property rights, as regulated by relevant instruments of international law, are actually inadequate to properly safeguard indigenous peoples’ biogenetic resources and related traditional knowledge, which are therefore easily subject to practices of ‘biopiracy’. The best way to react to such an unfortunate tendency actually rests in the development of sui generis systems of protection of ‘collective’ property rights shaped according to the holistic vision of life of indigenous peoples, which should leave them free to decide whether or not – and on the basis of which conditions – their resources and related knowledge should be the object of economic exploitation. These systems would additionally help to resolve the existing ‘tension’ between the system established by the Convention of Biological Diversity and the TRIPs Agreement.