As part of an ongoing program of judicial capacity building and IP enforcement for Bosnia-Herzegovina (BiH), a delegation of eight BiH judges took part in CLDP consultations in Memphis, Tennessee, May 23-27. Planned in coordination with the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Tennessee, these consultations built on past IPR trainings and worked to improve the skills necessary to fairly, efficiently, and effectively adjudicate intellectual property civil and criminal infringement cases.

The judges met with professors at the University of Memphis School Of Law, District Court judges, local attorneys, a DOJ IP computer crimes specialist, and private sector stakeholders.  With assistance from the U.S. Federal Judicial Center, the judges began to draft an intellectual property benchbook which will set forth pattern instructions and suggested procedures applicable to intellectual property infringement trials and include BiH-specific case studies and explanations. The benchbook is intended to be a practical guide for judges as well as prosecutors and can be used for training purposes by the Judicial and Prosecutorial Training Centers in FBiH, Republika Srpska and Brčko District. This will be the first benchbook drafted and used by BiH’s judiciary and will serve as a model for additional benchbooks. CLDP’s judicial capacity building program aims to contribute to the enforcement of intellectual property rights in BiH by creating a critical mass of judges trained in the enforcement of IP laws in order to ensure predictable, harmonized, and efficient adjudication of IP infringement cases across BiH.