28. The Chair recalled that, at the previous meeting in November 2018, the Council had on its agenda the Sixteenth Annual Review under Paragraph 2 of the Decision on the Implementation of Article 66.2 of the TRIPS Agreement. At that meeting, delegations had briefly presented the reports submitted by developed country Members under Article 66.2(IP/C/W/646 and Addenda) as well as a proposal by the LDC Group entitled "Proposal on the Implementation of Article 66 of the TRIPS Agreement" (IP/C/W/640 and IP/RD/24). The Council had agreed that it would revert to the item at its next meeting to permit continued consideration of the submitted material.
29. In order to give LDCs more time to absorb the information provided by developed countries in their reports, and also to ensure that those reports were available in the official languages of the WTO, the Article 66.2 Workshop, which would have usually been held in November 2018, had been postponed. The Workshop had taken place in the two days preceding the meeting of the Council. Some of the capital-based delegates, who had participated in that Workshop would participate in the discussions under this agenda item. He invited delegations to comment on the materials that had been submitted for the meeting that had taken place in November 2018 and to share their experiences from the Article 66.2 Workshop.
30. The representatives of Chad, on behalf of the LDC Group, the Central African Republic, Senegal, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Vanuatu, Japan, Australia, Switzerland, the United States of America, Norway, New Zealand, the European Union, Canada and the African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO) took the floor.
