57. The representative of Argentina said that the reason for not incorporating the Lisbon Agreement was simply that the European Communities did not have, at the time of the Uruguay Round, any great interest in that agreement. She thought that Article 23.4 had been included in the TRIPS Agreement with the hope of achieving a system that would be, as stated by the European Communities, more effective in international protection because they had not achieved what they wanted with the Lisbon Agreement, namely that the right to determine the grounds for rejecting protection would not be entirely left to national jurisdictions. For example, in the Lisbon Agreement, and contrary to what the European Communities was proposing to the Special Session, there was no mandatory body to resolve differences regarding a geographical indication. Each member State would make the determination according to its own domestic legislation, whether of not it wanted to provide protection. This was an important difference. She agreed with Chile that the Lisbon system had only a few members. A great number of them were EC member States, and some eighty per cent of the appellations of origin registered came from the same countries. Among those developing countries that were members of the Lisbon system, only a few ones had notified a small number of appellations of origin; others, in all the years of existence of the agreement, had not notified even one appellation. Even since the TRIPS Agreement had entered into force and countries had been more familiar with this category of intellectual property, there had not been any increase in registrations. The Lisbon Agreement was not one of the important international agreements WTO Members, particularly developing ones, were interested in joining. This had been the case during the Uruguay Round and was so in the current negotiations.
