Framing Harmonization: Illusion and Reality in the Riyadh Design Law Treaty

From the outside, the Riyadh Design Law Treaty (RDLT) has long appeared as a modest administrative measure.Negotiated in the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Standing Committee on Trademarks (SCT), it has repeatedly been characterized as a ''procedural treaty'' concerned with filing formalities rather than substantive reform.The contrast with the WIPO Treaty on Intellectual Property, Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK Treaty) is striking.Both treaties were adopted in 2024 after 20? years of negotiation.But only the GRATK Treaty attracted sustained scholarly and civil society engagement; the RDLT attracted almost none.The GRATK Treaty was negotiated in the WIPO Intergovernmental Committee on Intellectual Property and Genetic Resources, Traditional Knowledge and Folklore (IGC), a committee born of compromise and directed to issues of distributive justice for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) that were being addressed for the first time in the multilateral IP arena.The GRATK Treaty drew attention because it linked the patent system to long-standing struggles over the recognition of IPLC and low-and middle-income country (LMIC) ownership interests in their genetic resources (GRs) and associated traditional knowledge (ATK).The GRATK Treaty's opponents, largely high-income countries (HICs), framed the treaty's signature feature, a mandatory disclosure of origin requirement for GRATK used in creating an invention, as an encroachment that risked transforming the patent system into a mechanism for biodiversity compliance.Conversely, the RDLT was framed, including by WIPO, as a benign effort to