Jayashree Watal

Profile

Jayashree is currently a Visiting Professor at the National Law University, Delhi and an Adjunct Professor at the Georgetown University Law Center, Washington D.C. In addition, she is a consultant for intellectual property matters for the Department of Business and Trade, Government of UK, for the WIPO – Harvard University PatentX course on Patents and Global Health and for the International Trade Centre (ITC), Geneva.

Jayashree has worked in the Intellectual Property, Government Procurement And Competition Division (IPD) in the World Trade Organization (WTO), Geneva from 2001-2019. At the IPD, she contributed inter alia to the work on TRIPS and Public Health, Patents, Undisclosed information, Economics of TRIPS, IP and Transfer of Technology, and IP and Competition Policy.

Jayashree assisted in the negotiations that led up to the adoption of the Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health in November 2001; the interim waiver solution in August 2003; and the Protocol on the amendment that resulted in a new article 31bis (of the TRIPS agreement) in January 2017.

Before working at the WTO, she was in the Government of India (I.A.S. 1978) and represented India in the intellectual property negotiations in the Uruguay Round (1989-1991). Her book Intellectual Property Rights in the WTO and Developing Countries (Kluwer Law and OUP India, 2001) is referred to by students and researchers in many developing countries.

Jayshree has edited several WTO books, including one with contributions by TRIPS negotiators, the full text of which is available online. She has also published widely in peer reviewed journal and books in the area of both the law and economics of intellectual property.

Publications

• J. Watal (2021): “Balancing market and non-market objectives: Access to medicines”, in Daniel Bethlehem, Donald McRae, Rodney Neufeld, Isabelle Van Damme (Eds.). The Oxford Handbook on International Trade Law, 2nd edition, Oxford University Press, pp.651-672.
• J. Watal (2020): “Innovation, Intellectual Property, and Global Health”, in Robin Haring, Ilona Kickbusch, Detlev Ganten, and Matshidiso Moeti, (Eds.), Handbook on Global Health, Springer Cham, 2021, available here.