123. The Chairman said that, since its last meeting, the Council had received an update to a notification of a contact point for technical cooperation on TRIPS from Norway. The information on Members' transparency toolkit page had been updated accordingly.
124. As regards the LDC needs assessment process, he recalled that paragraph 2 of the TRIPS Council's 2005 decision on the "Extension of the Transition Period under Article 66.1 for Least-Developed Country Members" provided that "with a view to facilitating targeted technical and financial cooperation programmes, all the least-developed country Members will provide to the Council for TRIPS, preferably by the 1 January 2008, as much information as possible on their individual priority needs for technical and financial cooperation in order to assist them taking steps necessary to implement the TRIPS Agreement". To date, such information had been received from six Members, namely Sierra Leone, Uganda, Bangladesh, Rwanda, Tanzania and Senegal. The Council's 2005 decision also provided that developed country Members shall provide technical and financial cooperation in accordance with Article 67 in order to effectively address the needs identified by LDCs. Furthermore, it called for the WTO to enhance its cooperation with WIPO and other relevant international organizations with a view to making technical assistance and capacity building as effective and operational as possible.
125. He recalled that, at the Council's February 2012 meeting, he had said that the Council would revert to the suggestion Nigeria had made at the Council's October 2011 meeting that, if acceptable to it, the Secretariat should prepare a note aimed at indicating areas that had been implemented in those LDCs that had submitted their needs assessments, as well as the outstanding areas. This matter closely related to the annual review of technical cooperation that the Council would be undertaking at its next meeting, and to a Symposium on LDC Priority Needs for Technical and Financial Cooperation that the Secretariat was again planning to organize, at the request of the LDC Group, back-to-back with that review.
