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

Ambassador Vanu Gopala Menon (Singapore)
O UPDATE TO THE ANNUAL REPORT TO THE GENERAL COUNCIL
232. The Chairman recalled that the General Council, at its meeting on 10 February 2003, had taken up the question of the preparation of the annual report that the General Council was to submit to the Cancún Ministerial Conference. It had been agreed that the General Council would submit to the Ministerial Conference a brief update to its annual report for 2002, which would describe developments since December 2002. The Chair had clarified that this meant only the routine annual reports of a factual nature that all WTO bodies were required to make under existing procedures, and not any specific reports that Ministers at Doha had requested to be submitted to them. The Ministerial Conference would therefore have before it, as the annual report of the General Council, a compilation of the 2002 Annual Reports of all the WTO bodies, together with an updated report concerning developments in 2003. 233. Pursuant to this, the Chairman suggested that the Council ask the Secretariat to prepare an update to the TRIPS Council's Annual Report for 2002 that would cover the Council's work so far this year so far. He suggested that the Council adopt the report ad referendum, namely that Members would have a week to comment on the draft report once the Secretariat had made it available to them, and if there were no major substantive comments on it, the report would be forwarded to the General Council.
IP/C/M/40