Draft law amendments on enforcement finalised

The EU-Georgia Intellectual Property Project (EUGIPP) has been supporting the National Intellectual Property Center of Georgia (Sakpatenti) to develop amendments to the law on enforcement in line with EU legislation in this field. IP experts spent several months working in close collaboration with Sakpatenti and other Georgian enforcement authorities to draft the amendments. These have now been completed and translated into Georgian.

As a first step, the experts drafted a comparative study to identify and address the discrepancies between the EU and Georgian enforcement legislation. Based on the study’s findings, they drafted the proposed amendments. These underwent a series of stakeholder consultations throughout 2022 with the relevant Georgian authorities, such as the Investigation Department, the Revenue Service and the General Prosecutor’s Office of the Ministry of Finance of Georgia.

The amendments cover several aspects of enforcement legislation, with particular focus on administrative, border, civil and criminal enforcement laws. Moreover, a series of guidelines was drafted to provide Georgian enforcement officers with practical instructions on how to apply the new rules on administrative, border and criminal enforcement.

The draft amendments on enforcement are an important project milestone. Once adopted by the Georgian government, they will strengthen the administrative frameworks to enforce the protection of intellectual property rights in Georgia and will improve the quality of IP administration services.