India has proposed to include issues on intellectual property rights, equitable access to sustainable development and unilateral trade measures in the provisional agenda of the 17th meeting of the Conference of Parties, COP 17 to be held in South Africa next month. The proposal to include these three contentious but very important issues have been submitted by the Government to the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.

A statement by the Environment and Forest ministry stated that these issues have been neglected and not properly addressed in the 2010 Cancun decision despite being raised by India and a large number of developing countries . In its proposal, New Delhi has said that an effective and efficient global regime for management of Intellectual property Rights of climate friendly technologies is critical to the global efforts for development, deployment, dissemination and transfer of such technologies.

The proposal also states that the principle of equity must be defined so as to recognize that the global atmospheric resource is the common property of all mankind and each human being has equal entitlement to use of this resource in the interest of meeting the overriding priorities of developing countries.

India has also stressed that developed countries should not take recourse to Unilaterlal Trade Measures as this will have negative environmental, social and economic consequences for the developing countries.