109. The Chairman noted that the Council had partially overlapping mandates to work on three agenda items, namely the "Review of the Provisions of Article 27.3(b)", "Relationship between the TRIPS Agreement and the Convention on Biological Diversity" and "Protection of Traditional Knowledge and Folklore". The respective mandates were based on paragraph 19 of the Doha Ministerial Declaration and the built-in agenda of the TRIPS Agreement, as well as paragraph 12(b) of this declaration. Given the action underway in the context of the TNC on outstanding TRIPS implementation issues, the Council had agreed not to work on these implementation issues at the present meeting. Consequently, he requested that the Council's examination of these three matters not include consideration of outstanding implementation issues relating to them.
110. He recalled that, at its meeting in March 2002, the Council had urged more Members to provide by 1 June 2002 responses to the questionnaire on the implementation of Article 27.3(b). The Secretariat had issued airgram WTO/AIR/1756 on 26 March 2002 to remind Members of the Council's invitation to provide this information. He informed the Council that since then, the Secretariat had received responses and supplements to earlier responses from seven Members; no new information had been received since the Council's meeting of September 2002. As requested by the Council, the Secretariat had circulated an updated synoptic table summarizing the information in these responses in document IP/C/W/273/Rev.1.
