50. The representative of Australia said that the EC proposal was clearly more costly than the joint proposal for a whole range of reasons. One crucial difference was the issue of participation. Unlike the EC proposal, the joint proposal was entirely voluntary. It was the view of many Members, including Members that had not co-sponsored the joint proposal, that participation must be voluntary, which meant that there should not be any legal obligations for non-participating Members. As had been discussed previously and best expressed by Brazil and the Philippines at the September meeting, there was no point in discussing a proposal that would only provide for obligations with no corresponding rights to non-participants, and that would impose undue burdens and costs on developing countries, many of which did not have any economic interest in participating in the system because they had few or no wine or spirit geographical indications to protect. This had just been confirmed by the European Communities, who had said that 80 per cent of the world’s geographical indications were probably European. Members should therefore focus on those statistics when considering the costs and benefits of the various proposals. She asked those delegations who so far had not been active in these negotiations and whose views on this particular issue were not clear to carefully consider whether they were willing and able to take on the burden inherent in the EC proposal. As had been mentioned by New Zealand, non-participating Members would essentially have two alternatives: either to lodge reservations and enter into negotiations in order to exercise their existing rights to deny protection on the basis of certain exceptions; or to protect all EC geographical indications by not having been able to decline protection on the grounds laid out in paragraphs 3.2(a) to 3.2(c) of the EC proposal.
51. As to the argument put forward by the European Communities that their proposal would entail cost-saving benefits by helping right holders to enforce their rights in different jurisdictions, she asked how this would be different from trademarks or patents. She pointed out that the Madrid Protocol, which seemed to have been the model used by the European Communities, was a voluntary treaty, and that so far there had been no international patent register nor progress in the area of harmonization of patent law within the framework of WIPO.
52. She further said that her delegation had problems with the assertion made by the European Communities that the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation would have no problems with undertaking the burdens imposed by the EC proposal. Firstly, it would be unlikely that every Member of the WTO would have a similar body that would be in a position to assume the proposed obligations. Secondly, the question was not whether the Australian Wine and Brandy Corporation would have the capacity to take up the obligations, but whether it should have to do so, and whether Australia's existing rights to use the exceptions in Article 24 of the TRIPS Agreement should be limited in the way proposed by the European Communities. According to the proposed system, if Australia chose not to participate, lodge reservations or enter into negotiations, then it would have to protect all notified geographical indications unless, of course, it would be able to apply Article 24.4 and 24.5 exceptions, which were not, in any case, the only ones available under the TRIPS Agreement.
53. Finally, on the point that the mandatory negotiations requirement under the EC proposal had already been established by the TRIPS Agreement, she said that, if Members' intentions in the Uruguay Round were to increase the protection of individual geographical indications through a register of geographical indications for wines and spirits, then both paragraph 4 of Article 23 and paragraph 1 of Article 24 of the Agreement would have been placed in the same article.
