37. After the consideration of the legislation of the above countries, the representative of Brazil said that the review exercise had proved to be a learning process for her country as well as for other developing countries in the process of adjusting their national legislation towards progressive compliance with the TRIPS Agreement. Her country had not been in a position to offer questions during the present meeting because the Brazilian National Industrial Property Office had been fully occupied with the implementation of the new Industrial Property Law, which had entered into force on 15 May 1997. Nevertheless, her delegation would wish to avail itself of the right set forth in the procedures established by the Council, which provided that at subsequent meetings of the Council an opportunity would be given to follow up any point emerging from the review sessions which delegations considered had not been adequately addressed.
38. The Chairperson said that a number of delegations had indicated that they would provide responses to some questions put to them in writing subsequent to the meeting. According to the procedures for the review, responses should be submitted within eight weeks after the meeting. She hoped that those responses, together with a necessary fine-tuning of preliminary responses already provided, would be made available to the Secretariat by the time of the Council's next meeting scheduled for 15 July 1997, so that the records of the review could be produced without undue delay.
39. The Chairperson said that, in the context of the review of national implementing legislation notified under Article 63.2 of the Agreement, Members had addressed the following question: "Does your country recognize a right of priority on the basis of an earlier trademark application filed in any other WTO Member by a national of a WTO Member?" A similar question had been posed to WTO Members with respect to patents. It appeared that in every case Members did or would (when the amendments to relevant national laws and/or regulations were in force) recognize priority rights based on an earlier application in any other WTO Member by a national of a WTO Member. A compilation of the replies received would be circulated as document IP/C/W/73. The question had also arisen as to whether WTO Members currently bound to apply all provisions of the TRIPS Agreement were obligated to extend protection under Article 6ter of the Paris Convention to those WTO Members that were not members of the Paris Convention and were availing themselves of a transitional period under Article 65 or Article 66 of the TRIPS Agreement. All evidence suggested that this obligation currently existed.
40. Continuing, the Chairperson said that she would not attempt to summarize the work under this agenda item and took it that delegations would need time to digest the large volume of information obtained through the review process. In some cases, it had become clear that some Members still had some work to do to adapt their legislation fully and it was important that this should be done with a minimum of delay. In such cases, it might be possible that the Council needed to come back to consider the legislation of a given country once the amended text of its legislation had been received. She recalled that the procedures adopted for these reviews provided that at subsequent meetings of the Council an opportunity would be given to follow up any point emerging from the review sessions which delegations considered had not been adequately addressed.
41. Turning to the Council's next review meeting, the Chairperson recalled that the week of 17 to 21 November 1997 had been set aside for a Council meeting during which the review of legislation in the area of enforcement would be undertaken. She proposed that the Council use the same basic procedures as employed so far. The Council had, however, to agree on dates for the advance notice of questions and the submission of replies. She suggested a similar time path as agreed to for the review that Members had carried out this time and, therefore, proposed the following dates:
- submission of advance notice of questions to Member concerned and to the Secretariat: 12 September 1997;
- submission of responses to questions: 24 October 1997.
Furthermore, she invited Members, as agreed for the present review, to make an effort to give some form of advance notice of follow-up questions, prior to the review meeting. If these proposals were agreeable to Members, she wished to stress what she had said earlier about the notifications of responses to the checklist on enforcement still due by some Members. In many cases, these responses would be a main source of information about the enforcement procedures in the Member in question, since they would identify the relevant provisions in, for example, the Code of Civil Procedure; in the case of countries where this area of law was mainly governed by case law, it might be even the only source of information that could be notified by the country in question. If the responses due would not be notified without delay, the checklist would lose much of its purpose as a tool for the preparation of the November review exercise. Of the countries whose legislation had been reviewed at the present meeting, responses had not yet been received from Australia, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, the Slovak Republic, South Africa and Switzerland.
