203. The Chairman said that he had received a letter, dated 20 May 2003, from the Chair of the General Council, in which he had recalled the mandate he had received from the General Council to undertake consultations, in coordination with the Chairman of the Committee on Trade and Development in Special Session, on how to move forward the review of all special and differential treatment provisions. In this letter, he had explained that, in pursuance of that mandate, he had undertaken consultations on a possible approach to the work on special and differential treatment, and subsequently on 7 April 2003 circulated document JOB(03)/68 which had outlined his proposed approach for addressing the agreement-specific proposals on special and differential treatment provisions. An important element of that approach was an informal grouping of the 88 agreement-specific proposals into three categories. Category II of the list comprised agreement-specific proposals which he had proposed to be addressed by relevant WTO bodies. In accordance with his statement to Members at the General Council meeting of 15 May 2003, the two proposals relating to the TRIPS Agreement had been referred to the TRIPS Council.2 Accordingly, the TRIPS Council had been asked to consider these proposals as soon as possible, and to report to the last meeting of the General Council before the Cancún Ministerial Conference on the status of the proposals and the progress made in this regard.
