97. The representative of the United States congratulated the Chairman on his appointment and thanked Ambassador Tan for the excellent work achieved. She said that the United States fully appreciated the establishment of a multilateral system of notification and registration of GIs for wines and spirits as being part of the Single Undertaking and was fully committed to fulfilling this mandate. Her delegation was prepared to continue engaging and thinking creatively with other Members about how to achieve that objective, which was eminently attainable. It was apparent that there were significant gaps on important aspects of the registration system, particularly in the view of a few Members, and that these gaps appeared to have been reinforced and made clearer in the last several meetings and informal discussions of the Special Session.
98. Even so, her delegation considered that the Special Session was well-positioned to continue its work by virtue of the fact that there were detailed text-based proposals under consideration in this negotiation. The United States, as one of the numerous proponents of the joint proposal, continued to support this text as the optimal means by which the Special Session could fulfil the mandate for this negotiation. Her delegation believed that the joint proposal represented the appropriate basis for continued work of the Special Session and the best prospects for a rapid conclusion of its work. It remained the firm position of the United States that the registration system should convey no legal presumptions but should instead be limited, as the mandate made clear, to the facilitation of protection for wine and spirit GIs through a transparent system of information sharing. If progress were to be achieved in these negotiations, all Members had to keep the focus within the parameters of the mandate. She said that her delegation agreed with points made by New Zealand, Canada, Australia and other joint proposal proponents.
99. She also expressed her delegation's appreciation of Australia's detailed intervention on how the joint proposal would be implemented in Australia, and she would welcome hearing from others, specifically the proponents of TN/C/W/52, details on the various steps they would take in implementing their proposal in their domestic systems. Members should focus their discussion on facilitating protection, not increasing protection, as some were seeking. Proposals requiring that the entry of a term on the register would be prima facie evidence that it was a GI under Article 22.1 of the TRIPS Agreement would do just that, as this sought to achieve substantive legal effects in other domestic systems. Instead, she said, Members should focus efforts on developing a system that would aid examining authorities in their evaluation of whether a designation qualified for protection in that Member according to domestic laws.
100. She said that the principle of territoriality needed to be respected. Proposals that sought to require a Member to defer to a foreign authorities' finding of what constituted a geographical indication went well beyond the scope of the mandate and was thus unacceptable to the United States.
101. In order to move the negotiations forward consistently with the mandate under Article 23.4, Members should focus on developing a system to facilitate protection of geographical indications for wines and spirits. For the United States such a system would provide a useful reference that would facilitate the work of their examining authorities without prescribing the significance or weight that the domestic authority afforded to such information when evaluating whether a term qualified for protection as a GI under its domestic laws.
102. She said that the details of the scope and application of the register had to be clearly spelled out. The United States could not endorse any so-called "constructive ambiguities".
103. In concluding, she said that, as the agenda of this Special Session limited the negotiation to the establishment of a multilateral system of notification and registration of GIs for wines and spirits, her delegation objected strongly to any discussion of other TRIPS-related issues in this context. As noted previously, it was neither appropriate nor productive to endeavour to tackle the serious technical issues in this negotiation by lumping them in a broader process linked with other TRIPS issues.
