The Court of Justice of the EU prohibits the registration of the trademark “Pablo Escobar”

Brussels – A brand contrary to public order and decency, which the public would associate with drug trafficking and narcoterrorism. Puerto Rico-based Escobar Inc. will not be allowed to register the Pablo Escobar brand name with the European Union.

The Court of Justice of the EU ruled this today (April 17), dismissing a controversy that began on September 30, 2021, when Escobar Inc. applied to the EU Office for Intellectual Property (EUIPO) for permission to register its trademark for a wide range of goods and services. After having its doors closed by EUIPO, the company had appealed the refusal to the Court of Justice.

The EU judges reconstructed EUIPO’s initial assessment, which had been based on the perception of the Spanish public, among whom the drug lord and founder of the Medellín cartel is “particularly well known” because of Spain’s relations with Colombia. According to the Court, the EUIPO was based on the perception of Spaniards who are “reasonable, endowed with average thresholds of sensitivity and tolerance and who share the indivisible and universal values on which the Union is founded.” Values that include “human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity, as well as the principles of democracy and the rule of law and the right to life and physical integrity.”

Anyone who embraces these values, the court elaborates, “would associate Pablo Escobar’s name with drug trafficking and narcoterrorism, and the crimes and suffering that resulted, rather than with his eventual good deeds on behalf of the poor in Colombia.” Conversely, Escobar’s company claimed that the drug trafficker’s commitment to the local community, for which he built stadiums, schools, and hospitals, would make him a sort of “Robin Hood of the woods of Colombia.”

However, Pablo Escobar is known in the eyes of the world as the cocaine emperor, the richest and bloodiest drug trafficker who, in the 1980s and until he died in 1993, was the instigator of numerous massacres and attacks. On the strength of this, the Court of Justice upheld EUIPO’s refusal to register a trademark that “would be perceived as contrary to the fundamental values and moral norms prevailing in Spanish society.”

This is not the first time the European Union has blocked the registration of brands contrary to the fundamental principles and values of the European political and social order. A similar case had concerned back in 2018 the application for registration of the figurative trademark “La mafia se sienta a la mesa” (i.e., “The Mafia sits at the table”) by a Spanish restaurant chain. The EU Court of Justice declared its illegality because it was contrary to public order and morality, as it was unequivocally reminiscent of mafia-style organized crime.