FSG goes to Supreme Court over UPOV Convention

Food Sovereignty Ghana (FSG) Thursday, 11th November, 2021, filed a legal suit at the Supreme Court of Ghana challenging the constitutionality of the Plant Variety Protection Act, Act 1050, 2020.

In a Statement of Case filed today at the Supreme Court, by our lawyers, Dromoh Chambers, FSG is seeking an interpretation of whether or not the Constitution of Ghana was breached by the passage of the Plant Variety Protection Act and if Ghana was a party to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV) at the time the Act 1050 was passed.

“This court action is the culmination in our long struggle to uphold the rights of farmers to freely save, use, exchange and sell farm saved seed and other propagating materials. The claim states among others, that the UPOV 91 Convention is an unnecessary infringement on farmers’ rights because the WTO TRIPS Agreement makes room for other sui generis models that do take into consideration related international conventions and the Human Rights System such as the Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture or the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and affirming the sovereign rights of States over their natural resources such as the Convention on Biological Diversity and implementing the fair and equitable sharing of the benefits arising from the utilization of genetic resource and the related traditional knowledge,” it stated.