THE IMPLEMENTATION OF STATUTORY RULES FOR VARIETY DENOMINATIONS IN THE EU; THE CPVO DATABASE

Community plant variety rights shall be granted to varieties that are Distinct, Uniform, Stable (DUS criteria), new and have a suitable variety denomination. The rules applied by the Community Plant Variety Office (CPVO) as to the suitability of variety denominations are in line with the International Union for the Protection of new Varieties of Plants (UPOV) recommendations. These rules are implemented by all authorities granting plant variety rights in the European Union but also by authorities listing varieties of vegetable and agricultural species for which a registration is necessary for the purpose of commercialisation.
In the ornamental and fruit sector, such a registration is not compulsory and the general rules as laid down in the International Code for the Nomenclature of Cultivated Plants (ICNCP) apply.
The CPVO tries to cooperate as much as possible with registration authorities applying ICNCP rules in order to take similar decisions with the objective of having one single name for a given variety.
For this it is necessary to achieve as much similarity as possible between the UPOV recommendations and the ICNCP rules, and to cooperate in their interpretation.
One concrete example in the implementation of the UPOV recommendation and the ICNCP rules is the CPVO centralised database on variety denominations. In the ICNCP rules and the UPOV recommendations, one of the principles is that the proposed denomination must be different from every denomination which designates an existing variety of the same plant species or of a closely related species.
In order to verify whether the proposal fulfills this rule, the CPVO constructed a database containing denominations of existing varieties in co-operation with the UPOV Office.
Member States of UPOV and the EU are encouraged to submit regularly an update of their official registers of protected varieties and of varieties authorized for marketing in their country.
The database contains more than 500,000 denominations to date and is equipped with a searching tool to look for existing similar denominations of the relevant species upon entering a denomination proposal for a given species. Results are ranked according to a similarity index.
The database is available on the internet to all contributing authorities and to EU based breeders applying for plant variety rights.
In order to take into account as many existing varieties as possible, in particular in the ornamental and fruit sectors, the CPVO recently added to the database various commercial registers of varieties marketed in The Netherlands and the register of the Institut National d’Horticulture in France was appointed International Cultivar Registration Authority for Hydrangea. The CPVO is looking forward to further cooperation with other registers of plant varieties.