For nearly half a century, Pedro Roffe has been a catalyst and an influential leader in global debates shaping today’s international intellectual property system, particularly its interface with a range of issues such as technology transfer, trade, development, investment and public health. At the Secretariat of United Nation Conference on Trade and Development, where he spend most of professional career, Pedro Roffe played an instrumental role in the negotiation on International Code of Conduct on Technology Transfer and in pioneering the debate on implications of the TRIPS Agreement for developing countries.
Upon leaving the United Nation, Pedro joined the International Centre for Trade and Sustainable Development, where for the past fifteen years; he spearheaded vast body of body of policy research addressing the many dimensions of global intellectual property system, and identifying new directions and policy options for development. This influential literature addresses the challenges of innovation and intellectual property in context of the WTO, WIPO, and free-trade agreements with the explicit aim of facilitating sustainable development and public policy objectives.
A man of dialogue and a humanist, Pedro Roffe worked relentlessly to bridge the gap between different ideological view points, and to overcome entrenched positions in order to reach compromises and find solutions that advance mutual understanding, international collaboration and more broadly the public good. This conference will pay tribute to seminal contribution of Pedro Roffe to international cooperation and diplomacy in the field of intellectual property rights. The conference agenda addresses contemporary challenges in intellectual property, trade and innovation policy with attention to policy levers conducive to forging new institutional platform that are better equipped to deal with multifaceted dynamics of modern global regulatory and economic order.
