Kuwait Joins International Patent Cooperation Treaty

Kuwait has officially joined the Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT), the country's Permanent Representative to UN and International Organizations in Geneva Ambassador Jamal Al-Ghunaim announced last week.

Ambassador Al-Ghunaim was speaking after he handed over Kuwait’s PCT instrument to the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Director General, Francis Gurry. The contracting states, the states which are parties to the PCT, constitute the International Patent Cooperation Union.

The Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) is an international patent law treaty, concluded in 1970. It provides a unified procedure for filing patent applications to protect inventions in each of its contracting states. A patent application filed under the PCT is called an international application, or PCT application.

By joining the PCT, Kuwait has thus made much headway in organizing intellectual and industrial property, patents in particular, he noted. It needs to be added that a PCT application does not itself result in the grant of a patent, since there is no such thing as an ‘international patent’, and the grant of patent is a prerogative of each national or regional authority.

In other words, a PCT application, which establishes a filing date in all contracting states, must be followed up with the step of entering into national or regional phases to proceed towards grant of one or more patents.

This is part of a series of agreements Kuwait has joined over the past two years, Al-Ghunaim said.

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