134. The representative of the WTO Secretariat gave the following replies:
- The CRN database was available in the three official languages of the Secretariat: English, French and Spanish, and notifications were translated into the three languages as well. The time line for translations would be difficult to establish since some notifications consisted of one page and others of 500 pages of text in a single piece of legislation. Four to five days might be an average for short documents.
- The cost of translation varied according to the size of the document.
- All the amendments to notifications that had been issued were communicated generally by the division concerned and a corrigendum was issued to the original document.
- All documents posted in the CRN were publicly available to Members and outside the Secretariat; there was no restriction.
- The obligation to notify applied to all signatories of the WTO Agreements. That was the reason why the CRN applied a call-and-reminder twice a year, that was a call issuing the full list of obligations which each Member was required to fill in the coming 12 months and a reminder, which was the means of reminding Members who had not notified that they should do so.
- The CRN was content to prepare lists of notifications made and submit them to the responsible divisions. Compliance would be ensured via the calls-and-reminder exercises monitored by the divisions. The CRN prepared lists of what had been notified and submitted them to the responsible divisions. It was then decided whether there was anything lacking and the reminders were then sent out to the appropriate bodies.
- The completeness of the data in the CRN was dictated by the requirements of the original decision. It specified clearly what information was to be collected and made available for Members upon request.
- Documents online was a bibliographic database. It was not intended to be more than a register of documents with a brief indication of their content and providing an access to the main elements of the documents. Therefore, the CRN did not contain an exhaustive description of the full contents of every notification recorded.
- The fact that there were only two staff members for the operation of the CRN would seem to indicate that the system was highly mechanized and automated. However, as had been indicated in the presentation, most of the work involved in the recording and preparation of notifications happened outside the CRN, namely in the relevant divisions and afterwards in Documents Control Section, which was in charge of translation, editing and production.
