High Council for Legislation Confirms Syria’s Request for Legalized PoA for All IP Applications

DAMASCUS - Abu-Ghazaleh Intellectual Property (AGIP) would like to inform its clients that the decision of the High Council for Legislation in Syria No. 263 of 2010 has been recently upheld by the Syrian Property Protection Department (PPD) stipulating that the Powers of Attorney (PoA) should be legalized up to the Syrian consulates abroad.

Last July, AGIP announced that the Syrian PPD has been recently requesting the PoA to be duly legalized up to the Syrian consulates abroad, which subsequently involves obtaining the Interior Ministry's approval and super-legalization on this document by the Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

This practice comes in compliance with the Interior Ministry's regulations to obtain clearing approval on the Powers of Attorney for all Intellectual Property applications in Syria (trademarks, designs, patents, recordals, appeals, oppositions…).

The procedure of super-legalizing the Power of Attorney in Syria takes (2 - 3 months) and involves extra cost. The late filing of the PoA within the subsequent six-month grace period is also surcharged with fine payment per month/application.

The Trademark Office’s demand is to be applied on all the pending applications retroactively, therefore, we ask our valued clients who have pending applications)which lack such a legalized document ) to presently provide us with a PoA legalized up to the Syrian consulate

Therefore, it is envisaged that the Syrian PPD would consider those applications, which were not supported with a Power of Attorney (fully super-legalized) during a six-month period from the applications filing dates, as abandoned, and may request to pay fresh filing fee only for the reactivation of such applications after submitting the super-legalized POAs.

However, we have called for an immediate meeting of the Consultancy Committee of the PPD in order to discuss this crucial point and to determine on the effective date of the said decision/demand. We will inform our clients with the out come in due course.

It’s worth mentioning that the advantage of one Power of Attorney legalized up to the Syrian consulate is that it can be used permanently, since AGIP Syria office will deposit it at the Notary Public in Damascus, and extract original copies thereof locally for the number of the applications required as well as each time we receive instructions to attend to new IP procedure in Syria. Consequently, it will no longer be necessary to send us new Powers of Attorney for the future matters.