341. The Chairman recalled that the list of the 17 pending requests for observer status in the Council for TRIPS by other intergovernmental organizations was contained in document IP/C/W/52/Rev.11. Since the Council's meeting in March 2010, the WTO Secretariat had received a letter from the Executive Secretary of the Secretariat of the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), dated 18 May 2010, in which he renewed the CBD Secretariat's request for observer status in the Council for TRIPS. Recognizing that prior requests for formal observer status had not been successful, he wrote that the CBD Secretariat would welcome receiving an ad hoc invitation whenever the relationship between the CBD and the TRIPS Agreement was on the Council's agenda. The Chairman said that this letter had been faxed to all Members before the meeting.
342. The Chairman further recalled that the Council had discussed these pending requests at its previous meetings, but had not been able to reach consensus on any of them. At its last meeting, the Council had focused on the requests from the CBD Secretariat and from two African regional intellectual property organizations, namely the African Regional Industrial Property Organization (ARIPO) and the African Intellectual Property Organization (OAPI). In respect of these three organizations, the proposals on the table were that those organizations be granted ad hoc observer status on a meeting by meeting basis.
343. As agreed by the Council at its meeting in March, he had continued consultations on the pending requests, including at the Council's informal meeting the previous morning. In the light of these consultations, he proposed that the Council agree to grant ad hoc observer status on a meeting by meeting basis to ARIPO and OAPI, and that he continue his consultations on the request from the CBD Secretariat.
