WILLEMSTAD – International beverage producers such as Hennessy and Moët & Chandon cannot use trademark law to prevent retailers on Curaçao from selling parallel-imported bottles from which identification codes have been removed. This follows from several rulings by the Gemeenschappelijk Hof van Justitie, which were published on Wednesday.
The cases concerned the sale of luxury alcoholic beverages whose identification codes had been removed from the bottles. The products included Hennessy cognac, Moët & Chandon champagne and Belvedere vodka that had entered the Caribbean market through parallel import channels.
The producers argued that removing the codes constituted an infringement of their trademark rights and that sales of such bottles should therefore be prohibited. The court rejected that argument and upheld earlier judgments in which the claims of the brand owners had already been dismissed.
According to the court, the principle of worldwide exhaustion of trademark rights applies in Curaçao as well as in Sint Maarten. This means that once a product has been placed on the market anywhere in the world with the consent of the trademark holder, the brand owner generally cannot oppose its further resale, including through parallel imports.
The court noted that trademark holders can only block resale if there are legitimate reasons to do so, such as when the condition of a product has been altered or deteriorated. The mere removal of identification codes is not automatically sufficient, unless it can be demonstrated that those codes are essential for purposes such as consumer safety, product recalls or the prevention of counterfeiting.
The court emphasized that trademark law is not intended to give producers full control over distribution channels or to block parallel imports. For small, import-dependent markets like Curaçao, the system of worldwide exhaustion is intended to prevent products from becoming unnecessarily expensive due to restricted supply.
The rulings mean that supermarkets and liquor retailers on Curaçao and Sint Maarten are allowed to continue selling parallel-imported luxury spirits. Efforts by international producers to limit such sales through trademark law have once again been rejected by the court.