Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights in Bangladesh: To What Extent Is It TRIPS-Responsive?

In recent times with the adoption of TRIPS we observe that enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) has emerged as a pressing issue on the global economy, and in the national and international intellectual property agenda. Particularly, whilst the WTO definitely promotes big IP exporters, scholars are tremendously worried about TRIPS “one size fit all” attitude that ultimately disregards the heterogeneity of the world’s populace and the exertions that threatens developing and least developed countries. The big and vital challenge facing by the developing country like Bangladesh today is how to cope with the mounting number of demands from intellectual property rights-holder, national and foreign, to upgrade their system for the enforcement of IPRs. And the effort of Bangladesh, in this respect, is not totally insignificant, for as a WTO family member Bangladesh imperatively needs to make it its IP regime TRIPS-responsive by 2021 starting from 1 July 2013. In this environment, this paper seeks to address briefly how the intellectual property rights are enforced in Bangladesh and to what extent the IPRs implementation and enforcement mechanism in Bangladesh is TRIPS-compliant. Finally this paper tries to put some recommendations to meet the WTO obligations using the TRIPS flexibilities.