17. The Chairman recalled that the review of legislation in the areas of patents, plant varieties, integrated circuits, undisclosed information and the control of anti-competitive practices was scheduled for the Council's next meeting at the end of May in accordance with the Council's decision of 21 November 1995 (document IP/C/3). The Council had agreed at the previous meeting that Members wishing to ask questions should provide advance notice of them to the Member concerned and to the Secretariat by 15 March 1997 with written responses due by 30 April 1997. A reminder concerning this agreed procedure had been circulated to delegations in WTO/AIR/501, of 10 January 1997. With a view to assisting Members in the preparation of this work, the Secretariat had prepared an informal checklist reflecting in which WTO documents laws and regulations in the areas concerned had been distributed (document No. 1130 of 27 February 1997). As the checklist showed, a number of the Members concerned still had not notified certain legislation in these areas. The same was also true for other areas covered by the Agreement and which the Council had reviewed in July and November last year. He therefore again urged the Members concerned to make any outstanding notifications without delay so as to maximize the usefulness of the Council's review exercise of national implementing legislation. In this context, he also wished to refer to the point that he had made at the review meeting in November 1996, when he had mentioned that, in a number of cases, delegations had referred to legislative texts in their answers to questions put to them which had not been notified to the Council. Only a small number of such laws and regulations had subsequently been received by the Secretariat.
18. While on the subject of the review to be held in May 1997, the Chairman proposed that all Members covered by the review would respond, in respect of patents, to the same question on priority rights that had been included in the trademark review. This question would read: "Does your country recognize a right of priority on the basis of an earlier patent application filed in any other WTO Member by a national of a WTO Member?"
19. As regards new notifications made under Article 63.2, the Chairman informed Members that the notifications of Cyprus and Romania that he had mentioned at the previous meeting had been circulated as advance notifications under paragraph 3 of the decision of the Council contained in document IP/C/2. Senegal had notified that its national legislation relating to industrial property was the Bangui Agreement adopted on 2 March 1977, while informing the Council at the same time that the revision of that Agreement was under way, in particular with a view to harmonizing some of its provisions with those of the WTO relating to TRIPS (document IP/N/1/SEN/1). New Zealand had notified a set of recent amendments to several of the laws and regulations which it had initially notified under Article 63.2.
20. Finally, the Chairman updated Members on the status of the responses to the checklist of issues on enforcement, which the Council had agreed should have been notified by 31 December 1996. To date, the Secretariat had received eight notifications in addition to the eight that were already available at the time of the Council's previous meeting. Responses had now been notified by Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, the European Community, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Liechtenstein, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. He urged other Members which had not yet notified their responses to the checklist to do so without delay so that the Council's review of national implementing legislation in the area of enforcement, which would take place in November 1997, could be as useful as possible. He also noted that some of the responses received did not address all the questions in the checklist or did so only in relation to certain categories of intellectual property.
