481. Since the last TRIPS Council Meeting in February, the Trade Policy Reviews of the Philippines, Montenegro, Guinea and Mauritania have taken place. In the interest of time, we will not attempt to summarize the full range of IP issues covered in each of these reviews; we will limit the update to those matters on which other Members actively registered an interest by posing questions during the review process. The issues that were of particular interest in this concrete sense included:
The exhaustion regime;
Administrative capacity in national intellectual property offices;
Protection of copyrights;
Geographical indications;
Patent protection for inventions related to computer software;
Compulsory licensing regime, including preventing diversion of pharmaceutical products imported through a special compulsory license;
Supplementary protection certificates for patents;
Registration and protection of partial designs as industrial designs;
Government agencies involved in enforcement;
Enforcement of intellectual property rights at the border and in transit;
Specific legislation on parallel imports and customs treatment of goods suspected of infringement;
Existence of policies to allow or prohibit importation of goods and services containing any form of intellectual property rights;
Definition of "infringing goods" and visits to businesses suspected of engaging in intellectual property violations;
Ratification of the Protocol amending the TRIPS Agreement and of the 2015 Bangui Agreement; and
Accession to WIPO Conventions (Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants 1991; Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired or Otherwise Print Disabled).
482. Additionally, we have contributed with to the TRIPS-related section for the G20 and WTO-wide Director-General's Monitoring Reports, which should be circulated the coming weeks. On this occasion, the section highlights certain trade-related IP policy initiatives undertaken by Canada, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Moldova, China, Mexico, Seychelles, Singapore, Thailand and Turkey.
