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

Ambassador Chak Mun See (Singapore)
World Trade Organization
I REVIEW OF THE APPLICATION OF THE PROVISIONS OF THE SECTION ON GEOGRAPHICAL INDICATIONS UNDER ARTICLE 24.2
141. In response to comments made with regard to the Secretariat summary paper, the representative of the Secretariat said that, while the structure of the summary paper did not follow exactly the same order as the outline, the Secretariat considered it to be in line with the spirit of the outline. The Secretariat had not considered the outline to be a rigid straightjacket, provided that all the issues identified in the outline would be covered; when dealing with a large body of material, to some extent the material itself dictated the structure of logical presentation. As regards terminology, he referred to paragraph 5 of the summary paper, which explained that the Secretariat had sought to avoid the use of terms that occurred in the Agreement if these might be interpreted as implying that the Secretariat was making statements about whether a Member was or was not in conformity with its legal obligations. For that reason, the summary paper used the term "indication of geographical origin" and not "geographical indication", which term was the subject of a legal definition in Article 22.1. He recalled that the summary paper currently before the Council was a preliminary version of the paper, for reasons explained in its paragraph 4, and that delegations had the opportunity to indicate any factual corrections necessary. Of course, as pointed out in paragraph 6 of the summary paper, the paper was not a substitute for the information provided by Members in response to the Checklist. For anybody who wanted to get a picture of a particular country's system, the best place was to go the responses to the Checklist from that country.
IP/C/M/29