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

Ambassador Karen Tan (Singapore)
European Union
C TRANSITIONAL REVIEW UNDER SECTION 18 OF THE PROTOCOL ON THE ACCESSION OF THE PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC OF CHINA
62. The representative of the European Communities said he was disappointed about China's response regarding the lack of clarity of questions. Any lawyer could answer a question by at least one other question, but the point was to answer the questions in this review mechanism. Since these questions had all been discussed bilaterally between the EU and China in their IP dialogues and working groups, he could not accept the argument that China did not know what these questions were about. His delegation was worried to hear that it was impossible to clean out a market of counterfeit goods, because that was what the TRIPS Agreement said Members should do. The comparison with the doctor and policeman regarding future action was irrelevant since nobody asked China to commit that there would be no more counterfeiting ever, but his delegation would first like to see that there was no more counterfeiting as of the present day. It was understandable that there would be enforcement issues on the scale of an entire country, and that was not a problem. But here, as specified in its question, the European Communities was referring specifically to the Beijing Silk Market, the largest counterfeit market of the world in downtown Beijing next to the diplomats' quarter, which was a six floor building full of counterfeits. So this was not an issue of pockets of lack of enforcement, but a specific case which had been highlighted for years as a high priority. With respect to the term "clean out", he said that while he sympathized with not being of English mother tongue, the formulation "clean out" could easily be replaced by "emptied of counterfeit goods", or "close the markets" since the market in question was exclusively relying on counterfeit goods.
IP/C/M/61