91. The Chairman said that he had held consultations on the afternoon of 12 June with a group of delegations on two issues. One was to see whether it would be possible to make headway on the key issues in a somewhat smaller setting, in particular that of legal effects or consequences of a registration. The second issue was that of the nature of the working paper which the Special Session should produce by the end of July, and how the Special Session might best organize its work over the coming weeks in order to be in a position to produce this paper.
92. In regard to the key points of difference, the discussion focused largely on three questions: what was meant in the group's mandate by "facilitate protection", including whether this should or should not entail legal presumptions; territoriality; and the integrity or reliability of data in the register. He believed that it was fair to say that the discussion covered much the same ground on these points as had been formally discussed in the present meeting. He was afraid that, both in the consultations of 12 June and in the consultations that he had held in a number of formats since the last meeting of the Special Session, he had not been able to identify new points of convergence. Positions on key issues clearly remained far apart and it remained difficult to identify where the "landing zone" for these negotiations might lie. Some Members had indicated a readiness to consider, at least to some extent, ways of taking account of the concerns of other delegations, but often with the proviso that this would depend on reciprocal movement by those other delegations and/or on the overall progress of the Round. It was also not clear to him how far the flexibility to which some delegations had alluded would, if realized, go in bridging the gaps that existed.
93. With regard to the second issue on which he had held consultations on 12 June, namely the nature of the working paper which the Special Session should produce by the end of July and how the Special Session might go about this, he recalled that the "Timelines for 2006" paper in JOB(06)/13 provided for a working document of the Special Session to be on the table by July 2006. He believed that it remained the expectation that this group should be in a position to produce such a paper by the end of July. He also recalled that, at the Special Session meeting in March, he had said that, bearing in mind the end-of-year deadline for the Doha negotiations as a whole, he considered that it would be necessary to have, before the summer break, a working document which could be used as a basis for the final product and in respect of which there would be a good degree of understanding among delegations as to where the main outstanding difficulties to be resolved lay. He had further said that, in order to achieve this by July, it would be desirable to have made progress in unblocking, well in advance of that time, the key difficulties that had impeded the work so far.
94. He said that during the present Special Session's formal discussions a range of views had been expressed on the nature of the working document that should be produced. These included the idea that the Chairman might produce a compromise proposal and the notion that the side-by-side document might be annotated, for example through an annex setting out the points raised by delegations in regard to its various elements. The situation remained essentially unchanged following the consultations of 12 June consultations. One new element was the possibility of a Chairman's reflections paper.
95. He believed that, in the interests of this negotiation and in the Round as a whole, it was important that the working document that could be produced by the end of July would be more than an options paper which set out the different proposals on the table. He was looking to delegations over the weeks following the present meeting to be creative in finding new flexibility so that this negotiating group could be in a position to play its part in contributing to the progress that was necessary in the Round as a whole by that time. He did not believe it would be possible to find a solution unless all delegations were willing to move.
96. With regard to process, he believed that there was a general willingness to intensify consultations over the coming weeks and it would be his proposal that the Special Session schedule another formal meeting for 19 20 July. He would hold consultations in a range of formats, including with individual delegations, in small groups and in open-ended format. However, perhaps even more important was an intensification of consultations between delegations holding different views in order to make progress on the key issues and to identify the "landing zone".
