In May 2008, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) will be choosing a new Director-General. Historically, the selection process has been non-transparent and closed to civil society. In an attempt to open up the process, CIEL, Third World Network, and a group of civil society organizations invited all 15 of the WIPO Director-General candidates to meet with civil society groups on April 15, 2008 in Geneva. Candidates were also asked to respond in writing to 8 questions.

• The letter requesting a meeting can be found here.
• The Agenda for the meeting is available here.
  
  

A Webcast of the whole meeting in five sequences is available below:

Video 1 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5093362967627971571&hl=en
Video 2 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1312827334844132820&hl=en
Video 3 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8845402997045229188&hl=en
Video 4 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=5105921436401561633&hl=en
Video 5 - http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8998862960353259859&hl=en

The meeting was attended by seven of the candidates:

Mr. José Graça Aranha, from Brazil
Mr. Francis Gurry, from Australia
Mr. Masood Khan, from Pakistan
Mr. James Otieno-Odek from Kenya
Mr. Philippe Petit, from France
Mr. Bojan Pretnar, from Slovenia
Mr. Yoshiyuki Takagi, from Japan

The following sent their apologies for not being able to attend:

Mr. Jorge Amigo, from Mexico
Mr. Gjorgji Filipov, from FYR Macedonia
Ms. Alicia Adamczak, from Poland
Dr. Boris Simonov, from Russia
Mr. Toufiq Ali, from Bangladesh
Mr. Enrique Manalo, from the Philippines

Some candidates have already responded in writing to CIEL, or have made their presentations to member states available. CIEL will be placing the responses from other candidates on this website as they come in.

Written Response of Mr. Gjorgji Filipov (FYR Macedonia)
Written response of Mr. Jorge Amigo (Mexico)

A webcast will be available soon.


For more information, please contact:

In Geneva: Dalindyebo Shabalala, +41 22 321 4774, dshabalala@ciel.org;
In Washington, DC: Marcos Orellana, +1 202 742 5847, morellana@ciel.org

This page last modified on 28 April 2008.