Tribune News Network
Doha
HE Dr Hind bint Abdul Rahman Al-Muftah, Ambassador and Permanent Representative of Qatar to the United Nations Office and other international organizations in Geneva, met with Darren Tang, Director-General of the World Intellectual Property Organization, on Friday to present the State of Qatar’s instrument of accession to Madrid Protocol for the International Registration of Trademarks.
The meeting was also attended by Ahmed Issa Al Sulaiti, Director of the State of Qatar’s Office to the World Trade Organization and other economic organizations in Geneva, and Qasim Darwish Fakhro, Commercial Attaché at the Office.
The Madrid Protocol aims to achieve international legal protection for trademarks by submitting the application in one country. This constitutes a very important step for businesses and entrepreneurs in Qatar who wish to expand the protection of their trademarks internationally and protect their IPs through one application, in one language (English, French, or Spanish) and by paying one payment of fees in one currency. The Treaty guarantees benefits such as maintaining and renewing the registration, registering and transfering ownership of the international registration to others or changing the name and/or address or other data in a single procedure that applies to all designated Contracting Parties.
This step comes as part of a series of initiatives led by the State of Qatar within its NationalDevelopment Vision 2030 to strengthen frameworks for protecting IP rights and build an attractive economy to foreign investments. In 2023, Qatar ranked 50th out of 132 economies listed in the WIPO’s Global Innovation Index (GII).
