141. The Chairman said that he understood well the options for a Member to notify or not. The issue at stake was whether a Member should protect a GI notified by another Member. TRIPS Article 23.4 mentioned the establishment of a "multilateral" system of notification and registration, which led to one side saying that "multilateral" meant all Members. The mandate went on to say "in those Members participating in the system", which made the other side point out that Members which so wished would have the option not to participate. So, the debate between mandatory and voluntary arose out of this conundrum. While recognizing that in international negotiations wording had to be found to satisfy all delegations and leave subsequent negotiations to resolve the issues, he was of the view that it was not possible to have both, voluntary and mandatory participation, and that some compromise should be found. The arguments on the two sides seemed sound. However, this negotiating group could not leave the matter to be resolved by Ministers. Therefore, it would still be the responsibility of this group to put some scope on the possibilities of criteria that could help Ministers to make a determination. There should be some criteria that helped to identify which Member could opt in and which Member could opt out. He urged delegations to shed some light and help resolve the matter, otherwise he would have to come up with a proposal on his own.
142. Recalling the intervention made by Brazil cautioning that any possible criteria for mandatory or voluntary participation could create the undesirable situation where some developing Members would be asked to participate on a mandatory basis while other developing Members or even developed Members would be free to participate on a voluntary basis, he said that was clearly one of the issues that would have to be considered if, presumably, and when, this group reached the stage of looking at criteria.
