Minutes - TRIPS Council - View details of the intervention/statement

Ambassador Chak Mun See (Singapore)
M NON-VIOLATION COMPLAINTS
192. The representative of Australia said that his delegation's paper was intended to take forward the Council's work on non-violation. All Members had an interest in clarifying this difficult and obscure issue which led to varying levels of concern among Members. Above all, the paper focussed on the potential meaning of any recommendations that might be developed on scope and modalities and the sort of issues and sources of law that could be drawn on in doing so. The paper did not advance any formal position and concluded with some mere suggestions of the sort of material that recommendations could include, and some might even be considered obvious. It mentioned that non violation was widely perceived as having an exceptional character and there was a general interest in retaining it as an exceptional remedy; it referred to the arguably higher burden of proof for non-violation complaints; it drew on comments in other delegations' papers on the elements of a successful non-violation complaint; it considered how the expected benefits under the TRIPS Agreement could be assessed, referring to Articles 7 and 8 as well as the detailed substantive provisions of the Agreement; it addressed concerns raised in previous debates, such as avoiding undermining the consistent application of the agreements covered by the Dispute Settlement Understanding and the notion that non-violation complaints could be precluded for measures found consistent with provisions in the Agreement that permitted exceptions to intellectual property rights.
IP/C/M/28