Attorney-General Aiyaz Sayed Khaiyum has confirmed that three Bills will be tabled in Parliament next week for review.

While closing the 22nd Attorney General’s Conference, Sayed-Khaiyum says the Trademarks, Patents, and Designs Bills date back to the ’90s and once reviewed it will benefit Fiji as a whole.

Sayed-Khaiyum says the Bills will be in line with the Paris Convention for the Protection of intellectual property.

“If you register in one country your trademark then it automatically gets registered in all the other member states of that particular convention. So at the moment, there are 120 countries to this particular convention, so if you develop a trademark, a unique Fijian trademark you register it in Fiji and you are part of this convention, then 119 other countries will automatically recognize your trademark.”

Sayed-Khaiyum also highlighted that it would cut costs drastically for businesses or people wanting to trademark their brand.

“When we registered our mahogany brand we literally spent hundreds and thousands of dollars going to individual countries to register our trademark. Now under the new system, once the Bill is put in place and we’ve ratified the convention, all our trademarks will automatically get registered everywhere.”

The Attorney General adds that this was important because two world-renowned brands Fiji Water and Pure Fiji were initially registered in the United States and the United Kingdom – but not in Fiji.