Serbia obtains EU candidate status

The European Union has now put Serbia on the path to EU membership by granting the country candidate status.

The Serbian Parliament (March 2011)

From the former Yugoslavia, Slovenia has been a member since 1 May 2004 and will be joined by Croatia on 1 July next year. Serbia joins Macedonia and Montenegro as candidate countries; or as we should say, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia due to a naming dispute with Greece. Evidence of the political fragility of the Balkans.

Serbia has a degree of anti-EU feeling within it. It is just shy of 13 years ago when NATO bombed the country during the Kosovo War and I've seen at first hand that Belgrade and Novi Sad still contain the scars. Bear in mind this involved EU members Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom.

My experience of Serbian people is positive. A friendly group that looks forward and tries to show their country in a good light, some with the belief that the disintegration of Yugoslavia happened due to manipulative nationalist politicians.

I believe obtaining EU candidate status will be welcomed by most Serbians. Politically there is still some way to go. Kosovo is an obvious issue. Another possible stumbling block is in neighbouring Bosnia-Herzegovina. Bosnia is a federal country made up of one Serb entity and one Bosniak-Croat entity and political mistrust and uncertainty between them persists. The Serb part, the Repubika Srpska, may try for succession and if Serbia supports this, tacitly or officially, it may have a bearing on its own EU bid, particularly as Croatia will be a member by this time.

For these reasons, I anticipate the Serbian path to EU membership will not be one travelled quickly but, with some patience, we will welcome Serbia to the fold in good time.

It will create an interesting language situation for the EU. The Serbian language is the only European language with active digraphia (that means it uses more than one alphabet; a new word I have learnt today). It uses both the Latin and Cyrillic alphabets. Whilst Cyrillic is already catered for as Bulgarian is an official language, would the likes of OHIM use both alphabets for Serbian? (Latin script Serbian is almost identical to Croatian.) The Intellectual Property Office of Serbia only provides its national trade mark application form in Cyrillic. I understand this is considered a more formal alphabet, but you can correspond with them in Latin script.

With EU membership some time away for Serbia, OHIM will not be panicking on how they will be managing the Serbian language just yet.

Republic of Kosovo is 4

This day four years ago was a Sunday. I was living in Basel, Switzerland at the time and during the afternoon I decided to walk into the city centre and, inadvertently, joined the celebrations of the Republic of Kosovo's Declaration of Independence (from Serbia). Switzerland has a large Kosovar diaspora, estimated at about 10% of all Kosovars and Basel's Marktplatz was the meeting place for a crowd of Albanian flag-waving and whistling revellers. The flag of the Republic of Kosovo (below) was yet to be formally adopted.

It's actually just over four years that Kosovo began operating its own IP regime as on 19 November 2007 it opened an IP Office in the capital, Pristina. It has good intentions but is hampered by delays and this blog will give a brief overview.

Serbia does not recognise Kosovo's Declaration of Independence and it was not recognised by all other countries either. It has not applied to join the United Nations. Any request to do so is likely to be vetoed by Serbia's ally, Russia. Not being a member of the UN prevents Kosovo from acceding to the Madrid Protocol and means Kosovo is purely a national trade mark jurisdiction; the largest by population in Europe.

The IP Office works with paper files and has suffered from power cuts and from being understaffed which has resulted in a backlog of applications. It has looked at recruiting additional employees - and Kosovo suffers from chronic unemployment - but finding the right staff and getting them trained is still not a straightforward task. At least some of the local IP firms try to actively support the Office which is commendable.

Staffing resources have meant trade mark searches are restricted to identical/near identical searches and for word marks only which is far from an ideal situation when examination and registration is taking some time. It is something that will have to be lived with for the time being, but hopefully the Office is moving in the right direction. A useful development is that accelerated examination of trade mark applications has been made available since January, although this is only available in case of alleged infringement of the trade mark.

Kosovo does have an active Customs authority and it allows for trade marks to be recorded with them. They recently destroyed a number of counterfeited products of the Slovenian soap company, Ilirija, which demonstrates positive action. OK, the cynics amongst you will suggest this is due to large amounts of pressure from the EU, but let us not be begrudging in giving Kosovar Customs some credit.

When it comes to North Kosovo, this remains under the control of Serbia although there are border controls between them administered by the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo (UNMIK) who Serbia accepts as governing its province.

Serbian trade mark registrations should therefore provide protection in North Kosovo, including Madrid Protocol designations of Serbia.

Do note that it is possible to travel from Serbia proper to Kosovo and from North Kosovo to the Republic of Kosovo at the divided town of Kosovska Mitrovica. Whilst the Republic of Kosovo may look to assert its control over North Kosovo in the future, for the time being at least you should look to get trade mark protection in both the Republic of Kosovo and Serbia if the whole Kosovar territory needs covering. Interestingly, the Serbian (pro-EU) government recently denounced a local referendum held in the North Kosovo region which might be a sign of a softening of Serbia's stance towards Kosovo in general.