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 Country Placement

The Special 301 designations and actions announced in this Report are the result of close consultations with affected stakeholders, interested parties, foreign governments, the U.S. Congress, and of interagency discussions within the U.S. Government.

USTR, together with the interagency Special 301 subcommittee, works to make a well-balanced assessment of intellectual property protection and enforcement, as well as related market access issues, in accordance with the statutory criteria set out by Congress in the Special 301 statute (see Annex 1).

This assessment is necessarily conducted on a case-by-case basis, taking into account diverse factors such as a trading partner's level of development, its international obligations and commitments, the concerns of rights holders and other interested parties, and the trade and investment policies of the United States. It is informed by the various cross-cutting issues and trends identified below in Section I – Developments in IPR Protection and Enforcement. However, the assessment is especially based upon the particular facts and circumstances that shape IPR protection and enforcement regimes in a particular trading partner.

Going forward, USTR will continue to interact closely with the governments of the countries that are discussed in this report. USTR expects that, in preparation for and in the course of those interactions, it will:

 engage with U.S. stakeholders to ensure that the U.S. position with the foreign country is well-informed by the full range of views on the pertinent issues;

conduct extensive discussions with individual countries regarding their respective IPR regimes;

encourage those countries to engage fully and with the greatest degree of transparency with the full range of stakeholders on IPR matters; and

identify, where possible, ways in which the United States can be of assistance. 

USTR will conduct these discussions in a manner that both advances the policy goals of the United States and respects the importance of meaningful policy dialogue with the countries with which it is engaging.

Additionally, USTR works closely with other agencies to ensure consistency of United States trade policy with other Administration policies. For example, USTR works closely with the Department of Health and Human Services to ensure consistency of the Administration's trade policy (including support for the 2001 WTO Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health) with the Administration's health policy.