Indications géographiques et dénominations génériques en droit du commerce international : une conditio sine qua non ?

Geographical indications (GIs) have been at the center of international debates for a long time. Recently, several events have led to remarkable developments in the field. The EU has doubled down its efforts in promoting GI protection at the international level. Recent international agreements, such as the 2015 Geneva Act of the Lisbon Agreement on Appellations of Origin and Geographical Indications under the auspices of WIPO, or the bilateral trade agreements with Canada, China, and Japan, among others, have led the EU to claim important victories and progress on the international protection of GIs. Concurrently, the US has stepped up its efforts to put aside market sectors for generic names, i.e., names that are not protectable under GIs. The USMCA between the US, Canada, and Mexico, and the Economic and Trade Agreement between the US and China are good examples of the new US strategy. This article maps these recent developments and argues that GIs have recently taken up a whole new prominence in international trade law. This situation has been accompanied by a change in the stances of the EU and the US. Indeed, the EU appears to have adopted an increasingly rigid stance on GI protection, which has become a conditio sine qua non for multilateral and bilateral negotiations. In turn, and in response to this change, generic names have figured more prominently in the US international trade agenda. This notwithstanding, the gap between the positions of the EU and the US is not unbridgeable since, in reality, both parties legally recognize both GIs and generic names.