34. The representative of New Zealand thanked the EC delegation for providing some answers to questions that had been raised by her delegation earlier. She appreciated the EC's response that a decision had not yet been taken regarding the question of whether participation would be from individual member States or the EC. She hoped that the TRIPS Council would be kept updated on any decision reached on this matter. Regarding her question on LDCs' participation in the register given the fact that they were currently not required to be TRIPS compliant with Section 3, she noted that the EC had indicated that they would be inclined to explore the idea of LDCs being subject only to the register once they had brought themselves up to TRIPS compliance. She asked whether that meant that once LDCs had become TRIPS compliant with Section 3, even if they did not decide to participate in the system, they would nevertheless have additional legal obligations flowing from the register proposed by the EC. She was aware that developed countries who attempted to make points or ask questions on behalf of developing countries and LDCs were facing criticism. She pointed out however that there were a number of such countries in the same region of the world as her country that could not be represented at the current meeting of the Special Session but were likely to have a considerable interest in the answers to these questions. In response to Hungary's statement that the mandate of paragraph 18 of the Doha Ministerial Declaration meant that everyone had committed or showed willingness to participate in the system, she pointed out that paragraph 18 of the Doha Declaration still referred to the "implementation" of Article 23.4 of the TRIPS Agreement. In other words, the Doha mandate did not in any way override the fact that Article 23.4 in the TRIPS Agreement clearly provided for a voluntary system. Referring to the statement made by Hungary that no Member had yet said that it wanted to opt out of the system, she pointed out that most Members were probably waiting to see what the final form of the system would be before determining whether to participate or not. It would not be wise at this stage to take silence as meaning acquiescence. Turning to the EC argumentation about the distinction between the terms "plurilateral" and "multilateral", she said that her delegation remained unconvinced by those arguments. At the June meeting, her delegation had raised the issue of the definition of multilateral agreements that had been agreed upon in a number of other fora, i.e., that a multilateral agreement was open to accession by all countries (TN/IP/M/2, para. 126). New Zealand would continue to stand by that definition. A parallel could be drawn between the WTO Agreement and the treaties in the framework of the United Nations such as Multilateral Environment Agreements (MEAs). A number of these treaties did not have participation by every member of the UN but were still considered to be multilateral. If one were to use the EC argumentation and extrapolate it to the UN system, it could mean that the UN treaties were not multilateral and could only be considered so if their obligations flowed to every country in the UN system, regardless of their participation in the treaties. Such an interpretation would raise problems, for example, for those countries who were not party to certain MEAs and were concerned by trade measures or other obligations being applied to them regardless of whether or not they were participants in such MEAs.
