An integral part of its mission is the provision and maintenance of high quality, user friendly tools developed using in-house expertise and made freely available to member administrations.
Interface Public Members or IPM is the only global anti-counterfeiting tool and it is currently used by third of WCO members. IPM is a core component of the combating counterfeiting and piracy division of the WCO. As with all WCO tools all technical and operational advisors in IPR are acquainted with the tool and avail training opportunity provided to them by partner member administration to training customs officers.
The training was conducted in Port Vila from the 26th to the 30th of August 2013. Facilitators to the training includes an official from WCO, Hong Kong Customs and Japan Customs Services.
The new customs legislation recently passed by Parliament contains references relating to Intellectual property, and under the new legislation any goods that are counterfeit trade mark goods; pirated copyright goods; or goods infringing intellectual property rights are prohibited imports. The IPR workshop was timely in raising awareness of DCIR officers prior to the introduction of the new legislation and before any enforcement action is undertaken.
The one week seminar was organised for the benefit of operational customs officers and the national administration.
The objective of the seminar is to provide relevant stakeholders with an overview of the country-specific best practises and legislation in the domain of counterfeiting and piracy and to create a favorable environment for the sharing of experiences on a variety of topics such as:
· How to distinguish an authentic and fake product.
· How to distinguish the risk analysis techniques; a methodology which operational units of customs administrations employ to target high-risk consignments and which has resulted in an increased numbers of seizures in member administration.
The seminar is composed of two practical element which is the theoretical component and acquainting of best practices. This dual approach ensures provision of theoretical underpinnings of risk analysis techniques and the opportunity for practical application to ensure the future conversion of theory into action, allowing those present to draw the maximum benefit from the seminar.
