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of negotiations for the international regime on ABS, and support to national and
regional capacity-building efforts to help stakeholders appreciate the relevance of
ABS issues and the need to address them within ecosystem management options.
Along these lines, UNEP has undertaken a series of capacity-building pro-
grammes, mainly in Africa, based on the recommendations of the voluntary Bonn
Guidelines, which were adopted by the Conference of the Parties to the CBD in
April 2002, with the aim of helping countries achieve CBD objectives, and have
since been superseded by the Nagoya Protocol. These programmes mainly deal
with legal aspects of ABS, analysing national capacities, initiating training pro-
grammes and promoting regional cooperation.
The issue of ABS has also been debated at the FAO. Although it is not in the
mandate of the FAO to establish guidelines on ABS matters, these issues were
deemed important enough to be incorporated into the organization's International
Code of Conduct for Plant Germplasm Collection and Transfer (1993). The code
sets out the responsibilities of collectors, donors, sponsors, users and curators of
plant genetic resources. Among these responsibilities, curators are to:
take practical steps, inter alia by the use of material transfer agreements, to promote the
objectives of this code including the sharing of benefits derived from collected germplasm
by the users with the local communities, farmers and host countries… (FAO 1993 : article
13.3).
The international debate on ABS issues has therefore proven to be one of the
most complex aspects of negotiations in international forums outside the CBD,
particularly in so far as it relates to the inclusion or exclusion of human genetic
resources.
7.2.3 ABS and WHO
The WHO is a late entrant into the debate on ABS. It was only at the 60th session
of the World Health Assembly (WHA), WHO's supreme decision-making body,
from 14 to 23 May 2007, that the issue of ABS came up in a major way. Within the
framework of the International Health Regulations (WHO 2005 ), the WHA adopted
Resolution 60.28 (WHO 2007a , 2007b ). The work relating to the resolution was
undertaken at the intergovernmental meeting and the open-ended working group.
The importance of WHA Resolution 60.28 in the context of the CBD is that
it acknowledged the sovereign right of states over their biological resources. This
was a marked departure from earlier practices; for more than 50 years, the WHO's
Global Influenza Surveillance Network of laboratories, including its collaborating
national influenza centres, H5 reference laboratories and other expert laboratory
reference centres, had been sharing samples without clear obligations. The issue
came to the fore in 2007, when Indonesia refused to share its samples with the
WHO and observed that it was not fair to pass on ownership of samples to the
WHO collaborating centres without getting any benefit from the resulting papers
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