A mediation committee for intellectual property disputes was officially established in Nansha on April 23rd. The committee is under the district’s Market Regulation Bureau and consists of professional mediators working to cut both time and cost to seek rights protection while safeguarding Nansha’s industrial development.

Nansha has seen an increasing number of cases involved Hong Kong, Macao and overseas parties since the Nansha Free Trade Zone was founded in 2015, according to Nansha People’s Court. The court handled 234 cases from these territories between January to April 2019, nearly 5 times more than the previous year. The cases are mostly commercial (including IP cases) and 60 percent involved parties from Hong Kong and Macao.

Nansha has pushed forward a series of strategies in recent years to feed the demand for international legal services. For example, it established the Nansha International Arbitration Center which enables the parties to choose a suitable arbitration model that can adopt Chinese mainland, Hong Kong or Macao arbitration rules.

To offer better services for parties from Hong Kong and Macao, Nansha has formulated China’s first jury system to select Hong Kong and Macao juries as well as the first mediation system to hire mediation organizations and mediators from Hong Kong and Macao. Thus far, Nansha has employed 7 mediators from Hong Kong and Macao.

Based on government planning, Nansha will adopt more strategies to optimize international legal services and improve its business environment. For instance, it plans to encourage more Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao joint law firms to establish themselves in the district and introduce a recommendation mechanism to attract law practitioners with international backgrounds. It will also develop a more diversified dispute mediation system through putting a foreign law checking system in place and via communication between Nansha and overseas legal associations.

 

Reported by Jasmine Yin, Wang Chunxiao

Edited by Wing Zhang, Simon Haywood