Office of the United States Trade Representative

 

Special 301 Report Priority Foreign Country
05/01/2003

PRIORITY FOREIGN COUNTRY

UKRAINE

The U.S. Government withdrew benefits from Ukraine under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) in August 2001, and imposed $75 million worth of sanctions on Ukrainian imports on January 23, 2002, based on the repeated failure of Ukraine to comply with the June 2000 Joint Action Plan. These sanctions are still in effect due to Ukraine's failure to adopt and enforce adequate Optical Disc (OD) media licensing legislation. Although enforcement efforts have resulted in a significant decline in the production of pirate media within Ukraine, there is still substantial traffic in illegal optical disc media, both in street sales to consumers as well as larger distribution to Western Europe, the Baltics, and elsewhere. Despite these problems, Ukraine's copyright law is generally adequate and there has also been some progress in fulfilling TRIPS requirements as part of Ukraine's WTO accession process. Unfortunately, any positive movement on copyright is still overshadowed by the continued lack of adequate OD media protection. We urge the Ukrainian Government to pass an adequate optical media law in the very near future. In addition, enforcement of trademarks is lacking. A number of U.S. firms have complained of trademark counterfeiting for fertilizers and other industrial products.

 
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