12. The representative of Cuba said that Cuba had repeatedly requested information on the compatibility of Section 211 with the TRIPS Agreement under Article 63, but had not yet received a satisfactory response from the United States. At the previous meeting of the Council, Cuba had drawn attention to the time that had elapsed since the first formal request for information made by Cuba on 2 December 1998. To date, he emphasized, seven months had gone by and the situation, for reasons unexplained, had remained unchanged. The TRIPS Agreement was an integral part of the system of basic legal rules of international trade, binding on all Members and contained an appropriate mechanism to facilitate transparency in the multilateral trading system. If this mechanism was not applied, one of the pillars on which the system was built was considerably weakened, with all the consequences which it entailed, above all on the confidence which Members of this Organization had in its rules. No country, however powerful and wealthy, could simply ignore disciplines that had been agreed on a multilateral basis and certainly not the norms of an agreement which, he reiterated, did not allow for reservations, and the only exceptions permitted, those stipulated in Article 73, were not applicable to Section 211. Many times and in many fora, including in the UN General Assembly and in the Association of Caribbean States, the international community had expressed its rejection of unilateral coercive measures. At the recently concluded summit in Rio de Janeiro, which brought together leaders from Latin America and the European Union, participants had once again rejected unilateral measures which had extraterritorial effect, considering that they ran counter to international law and constituted an infringement of universally accepted rules of free trade and that they represented a serious threat to multilateralism as a whole. Cuba was not willing to accept arbitrary action which constituted an infringement of multilaterally agreed rules. By bringing into force Section 211, the United States had consciously violated the provisions of the TRIPS Agreement. It had subsequently violated the Agreement by failing to provide detailed and accurate information on the consistency of this new legislative provision with the TRIPS Agreement. Cuba's request could not be met by simply sending legal texts, sent incidentally at the last minute, approximately five months after the first request for information had been made. In addition, these texts could easily be found in other ways and, at any rate, provided no clarity and shed no light on the reasons why the United States authorities had acted in the way they had by bringing into force Section 211 of the United States Omnibus Consolidated and Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Act of 1998. The purpose of Article 63 was to illustrate and show the quality and good faith of Members' implementation of the Agreement. That went for all Members of the Organization in relation to all other Members. Section 211 impeded access to protection in the United States for applicants and owners of trademarks and trade names, excluding them from the benefits available under existing treaties and United States legislation itself. The retroactive application of Section 211 had also raised issues that were difficult to solve or understand and it hampered the exercise and maintenance of intellectual property rights. According to Cuban experts, Section 211 was inconsistent with the obligation undertaken by the United States to apply the TRIPS Agreement as from January 1996, in accordance with Article 65 of the Agreement. At the same time, it violated such important clauses as those contained in Article 3 on national treatment, Article 2 on intellectual property conventions, particularly with respect to the Stockholm Act of the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property, Part III on enforcement of intellectual property rights, in particular Article 41 on general obligations, and Article 62 of Part IV on acquisition and maintenance of intellectual property rights and related procedures. Section 211 was also a further step in the direction taken by the Helms-Burton Law. It seemed that now it was not only investments in property alleged to have been illegally confiscated after the triumph of the revolution in 1959 that were subject to sanction, but also the use, assignment or renewal of a trademark or trade name which were in exactly the same situation. Cuba had serious doubts regarding the provisions of Section 211, because its implications would not only have an impact on intellectual property rights as such, but would also create obstacles to trade and foreign investment in Cuba. The competent authorities in Cuba were studying the possibility of taking other actions in pursuance of the rights which Cuba had as a Member of the WTO. He repeated his delegation's request to the United States to provide it with detailed information concerning the compatibility of Section 211 with the TRIPS Agreement. At the same time, he once again insisted on strict and unconditional respect for the principles of the multilateral system, whose rules should apply without discrimination and in a fair and equitable manner. He requested the Secretariat to ensure that this statement was included in the minutes of this Council meeting and distributed to the Members of the Organization.
