12. The Chairman recalled that this sub-item in respect of notification procedures concerned those notification provisions of intellectual property conventions incorporated into the TRIPS Agreement but not explicitly referred to in it. As the Council had agreed at its meeting in September, the Secretariat had prepared a background note (IP/C/W/15), aimed at explaining the nature of the various notification provisions in question. Annex 1 to this document contained a list of those notifications already made pursuant to the relevant provisions of the Berne Convention and the Rome Convention and currently effective, which the Secretariat had compiled with the assistance of WIPO and the United Nations Legal Office. The Annex showed that there were only very few countries that had availed themselves of these provisions under the Berne and Rome Conventions. In fact, there were three countries that had made notifications which were currently effective under the relevant provisions of the Berne Convention: one country under Article 14bis(2)(c) of the Berne Convention, one country under Articles 14bis(3) and 15(4) of the Berne Convention, and one country under Article I of the Appendix to the Berne Convention. Four countries had notified under Article 17 of the Rome Convention. He also drew attention to paragraph 15 of the document, in which it was pointed out that the Council had already dealt with notification procedures under certain provisions of the Berne and Rome Conventions incorporated into the TRIPS Agreement by reference similar to the provisions discussed in the document, when it had taken the decision concerning notifications under Articles 1.3 and 3.1 of the TRIPS Agreement. If the Council wished to handle questions relating to notifications addressed in the document in the same way, Members wishing to make such notifications under the TRIPS Agreement would be invited to make them to the Council for TRIPS, even if the Member in question had already made a notification under the Berne Convention or the Rome Convention in regard to the same issue. Paragraphs 16 through 21 of the document contained a section which dealt with certain questions relating to the timing of these notifications. Since the Secretariat note had only recently been distributed in English, and French and Spanish texts were not yet available, the Chairman proposed that the Council revert to this matter at its first meeting in 1996.
