43. In regard to the procedures for the follow-up to the review exercise, the Chairman recalled that a number of delegations had indicated that they would provide responses in writing subsequent to the meeting to some questions put to them. In some cases this included the general question concerning priority rights that all Members had agreed to respond to.2 He suggested that such responses, together with a necessary fine-tuning of preliminary responses already provided, be made available to the Secretariat by 20 December 1996, so that the records of the review could be produced without undue delay. One other point which he wished to mention was that, in a number of cases, the Secretariat had noted that delegations, in responding to questions, had referred to legislative texts that had not been notified to the Council. The Secretariat would provide a list of such texts to the Members concerned so that they could take any necessary action in accordance with the procedures that the Council had adopted for notifications under Article 63.2. He said that the work under this agenda item had yielded once more a mass of information which would require time for delegations to digest. 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. He also recalled that the procedures adopted for this review (as reflected in documents IP/C/M/7, paragraph 6 and IP/C/M/8, paragraphs 69 and 70) 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.
44. Turning to the Council's review meeting scheduled for the first half of 1997, the Chairman recalled that, according to the "Schedule for Consideration of National Implementing Legislation in 1996/1997" decided by the Council in November 1995 (document IP/C/3), that review would relate to the areas of patents, layout-designs of integrated circuits and undisclosed information. The week of 26 to 30 May 1997 had been set aside for a Council meeting during which that review would be undertaken. He suggested that the same basic procedures would be used as employed so far and proposed the following dates for the advance notice of questions and the submission of replies, taking into account not only the experience with the review so far but also that the review of these areas was likely to elicit considerable interest and that there was a full six months before the review was scheduled:
-submission of advance notice of questions to the Member concerned and to the Secretariat: 15 March 1997;
-submission of responses to questions: 30 April 1997.
Given that the timetable that he was envisaging was somewhat more relaxed than that which the Council had had for the reviews conducted so far, he also suggested that Members make an effort to give some form of advance notice of follow-up questions, prior to the review meeting
