Felix Addor

Felix Addor serves as the Deputy Director General of the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property (Swiss Ministry of Justice), the federal agency in charge of all intellectual property matters in Switzerland (www.ige.ch). As the Institute’s General Counsel and Director of the Legal and International Affairs Division, he has been responsible for all legal and policy matters regarding all fields of intellectual property at the national and international levels since 1999. Among other things, he leads Swiss negotiating delegations to the relevant international fora, such as the World Trade Organization and the World Intellectual Property Organization, and to bi- and plurilateral IP-negotiations. He also acts as Co-Head of the Swiss Federal Inter-Ministerial Working Group on Public Health, Innovation, Trade and IP, and he is a Member of the Strategy Committee on the Swiss global health foreign policy.

In addition, Dr Addor has been a member of the external faculty of the World Trade Institute since its establishment (1999). Since 2008, he has been a Professor (‘Titularprofessor’) at the Faculty of Law, University of Bern. He lectures on intellectual property law, international negotiations and global governance. Moreover, since 2013 Dr Addor has been a Senior Fellow at the Global Health Centre of the Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, and since 2020, he is a lecturer on international negotiation at the Law Faculty of the University of Zurich, too. Prof Addor has authored numerous articles, and he is a regular guest lecturer on a broad range of issues of intellectual property and negotiation. He received a MLaw (magna cum laude) and a Dr. iur. (summa cum laude, awarded 1997 by the Professor Walther Hug Foundation) from the University of Bern, and he has been admitted to the Canton Bern State Bar since 1990.