Compte rendu ‒ Conseil des ADPIC ‒ Afficher les détails de l'intervention/la déclaration

Ambassador Chak Mun See (Singapore)
L REVIEW OF THE IMPLEMENTATION OF ARTICLE 71.1
144. The representative of Australia said that the submission of her delegation had been circulated as a non-paper so that it could take into account views expressed by other delegations on it before it would circulate a formal document on the matter. The non-paper was intended to promote discussion and put forward some ideas as to how the review might be undertaken to be as productive as possible in the course of 2000 and 2001. The paper was built on Australia's intervention at the Council's previous meeting (paragraph 95 of document IP/C/M/26). The TRIPS Agreement foresaw, first, implementation of existing TRIPS standards at the national level; secondly, notification of relevant laws by Members implementing the Agreement, and review of their intellectual property systems; thirdly, a collective review of the implementation of the Agreement; fourthly, consideration of possible amendments and modifications in the light of the experience of implementation and other developments; and, finally, formulation of recommendations for modification or amendment. Article 71.1 exemplified this approach, as it limited the general review the TRIPS Agreement mandated for 2000 to implementation only and laid down a clear sequence for future work. A review of "implementation" as provided for in Article 71.1 should cover the implementation of existing standards and policy options, rather than the consideration of the imposition of new or modified standards. Converting the Article 71.1 review into a preamble for negotiations rather than having a constructive exchange of factual information about implementation would greatly restrict the flow of useful information and could deny Members the opportunity to learn in a collective manner how TRIPS standards might be best put into operation so as to garner the benefits of intellectual property protection. To be complete, the Council's review of implementation would need to draw on the experiences of a wide cross-section of Members. A progressive, structured approach to the Article 71.1 review would be the most likely way to deliver a balanced, comprehensive and inclusive understanding of the operation and impact of the TRIPS Agreement for the full range of WTO Members. This approach had been followed in the Article 27.3(b) and Article 24.2 reviews and a lot of information had been provided to the Council for further discussion and analysis. The Article 71.1 review needed to have an inclusive approach and should allow an opportunity to those Members who had recently implemented the TRIPS standards to come forward with information on how they had done so. Therefore, Australia's non-paper contained a specific proposal that, in the period 2000 2001, the TRIPS Council should conduct an inclusive review of the implementation of the TRIPS Agreement by facilitating an exchange of experience of implementation at the domestic level, including by those Members that had made use of the Article 65.2 and 65.3 transition periods. This would yield the necessary information about "the experience gained in the implementation of the Agreement" that the TRIPS Council was required to draw on in its subsequent reviews under Article 71.1 as from 2002. The 2000 review under Article 71.1 need not be limited to the notification and documentation of domestic IP laws. The non-paper contained some illustrative examples of issues that could be discussed. These included measures to counter anticompetitive abuse of IPRs under Article 40; implementation of existing TRIPS standards in the digital environment; and IPRs in traditional and indigenous contexts. Finally, she noted that Article 71.2 provided for a possibility of amending the TRIPS Agreement so as to adjust "to higher levels of protection of intellectual property rights achieved, and in force, in other multilateral agreements and accepted under those agreements by all Members of the WTO". It appeared that no such agreement existed at the moment but in time there might be agreements that could be considered under that provision. She proposed that the TRIPS Council keep under review relevant multilateral agreements which might become eligible for consideration under that provision.
IP/C/M/27