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Counterfeiting-crime is dangerous counterfeiting
directly affecting consumer safety and public health.
This counterfeiting is damaging to states’ economies
and it discredits fledgling democracies.
Counterfeiting-crime is harmful,
it is organized counterfeiting, operated by criminal organizations,
which have considerable resources and which are prepared
to do anything to obtain the highest profit at the lowest risk.
It should be noted that luxury products only count for 8% of counterfeiting today.
Counterfeiting mainly affects the agri-food sector, medicines, spare parts, cosmetics,
and these counterfeits are therefore products that directly affect populations.
Intellectual property law has now reached its limits.
It is no longer able to provide an efficient response to counterfeiting-crime,
which is organized and structured by organized crime.
We therefore need to find other solutions and approaches.
This is why the WAITO Foundation was created,
not by intellectual property law specialists,
but by criminologists who understand criminal phenomena
and are able to anticipate the new contemporary risks and threats of counterfeiting.
The 21st century will be a key century for the fight against counterfeiting.
Counterfeiting-crime, or dangerous counterfeiting, is a major current problem.
Our objective today is to bring together all the means and measures needed by States
to allow them to counter this phenomenon, which is no longer an intellectual property issue,
as I have already mentioned, but which is a criminal problem, subject to criminal law
and which we must approach on an essentially criminal level.
The Northern Hemisphere has now been hit by this problem with full force.
I am thinking about Eastern Europe and, of course, the United States.
Not enough is said about the problem of counterfeiting in the United States,
seen in the transfer of medicines from Canada or Mexico,
or simply in the online purchase of medicines.
Nor is enough said about cosmetics, which are subject to intense counterfeiting,
and which are the cause of major health problems in the United States.
In Europe, the fact that Eastern Europe is immediately on the border
with mafia-run regions, makes the development of these unbearable markets inevitable.
China is one of the countries currently affected by counterfeiting.
This is partly a problem that it has created itself.
With its extraordinary development, China has been key in developing the counterfeiting industry,
not only for export, but also for the domestic market.
Of the products made in China, 30% are exported -
these are the products seen everywhere,
both in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres - but 60% stay in China.
This shows how much China is affected by counterfeiting.
China is the first victim of counterfeiting, regardless of what people say or do.
This is why the WAITO Foundation has set up a research centre on China in Beijing,
in collaboration with the main Chinese law and political sciences university in Beijing,
which trains the Chinese elite, through the university’s phd students,
to understand developments in China and to provide solutions for the Chinese Government.
This centre aims to create a university chair to train the Chinese elite in criminal-law measures
to combat counterfeiting-crime and to find new weapons against those making money
on the back of other people’s misery.