At a 13-14 May meeting of the WTO General Council, Members reached an agreement to reduce the waiting time for release of restricted WTO documents. A paper submitted by India and a number of other developing countries on transparency in preparing Ministerial Conferences was also addressed, and Members approved the date and location of the WTO's Fifth Ministerial Conference, now scheduled to be held in Cancun, Mexico on 10-14 September 2003.

Document de-restriction

After four years of talks in the General Council on document de- restriction, Members agreed to loosen the rules around when restricted papers can be released (see document WT/GC/W/464/Rev.1, available shortly at http://docsonline.wto.org/gen_search.asp). Where a delegation specifically requests that a document produced by the Secretariat be restricted, the waiting time for de-restriction has been reduced from approximately eight months to 6-8 weeks. While current procedures already provide that all WTO documents be de-restricted immediately upon adoption, the new procedures essentially reduce the list of exceptions to this basic principle. Approximately 30 percent of all WTO papers are currently circulated as restricted.

Under the new provisions, documents produced by the Secretariat can be restricted by the issuing body (i.e. the Council on TRIPs), and will be de-restricted 60 days after the date of circulation. They can remain restricted for a further 30 days if so requested by a Member, after which they are automatically de-restricted. Prior practice held these documents back from six months onward. Similar restraints were previously imposed on minutes of WTO meetings. De-restriction time for these accounts of WTO proceedings have now been reduced to 45 days. Given that some WTO bodies only meet a few times a year, this might be useful for those outside the WTO following up from past meetings and preparing for forthcoming ones. Members retain the right to restrict their own submitted documents, though they must renew their restriction requests monthly after an initial period of 60 days or until first consideration by the relevant body.

The previous procedures -- outlined in a Decision of 18 July 1996 in document WT/L/160/Rev.1 -- will however remain in effect for documents circulated prior to 14 May 2002.

The new de-restriction procedures represent a compromise between developed country Members such as the US, the EC and Canada, on the one hand, and some developing countries, including India and Malaysia, on the other. Industrialised countries had been pushing for automatic de- restriction of all documents, and one developed country source said that the EC was "less than enthusiastic" with the final decision, as it had been significantly watered down from previous proposals. These Members tend to post their own submitted documents on publicly- accessibly government websites. Some developing countries were less comfortable with releasing documents related to negotiating processes, saying they preferred to maintain the right to give their capitals time to review papers before circulation.

With regard to language provisions, the procedures note that all official WTO documents that are not restricted shall be made available via the WTO website once they are translated into all three official WTO languages (English, French and Spanish).

Preparation for Ministerial Conferences

A number of interventions were made at the General Council over a document submitted by India and the Like-Minded Group (LMG) of developing countries on transparency and participation leading up to and during Ministerial Conferences (WT/GC/W/471). Trade sources said that the LMG paper was in part a response to procedures followed in the preparatory process to the November 2001 Doha Ministerial and at Doha itself.

In its submission, the LMG proposes a number of elements to guide the Ministerial preparatory processes and those followed at Ministerial Conferences themselves, with the intent of creating a more automatic and predictable process than currently exists. Inter alia, these include: (i) making all consultations transparent and open-ended; (ii) the draft ministerial declaration should be based on consensus, and where this is not possible, differences should be fully and appropriately reflected (i.e. through square brackets); (iii) the Director-General and the Secretariat should remain impartial on the specific issues in the declaration; (iv) chairpersons at Ministerial Conferences should be identified by consensus in the preparatory process in Geneva; consultations by chairs should be only at meetings open to all Members, with meetings announced "at least a few hours in advance"; (v) negotiating texts and draft decisions should be introduced only in open-ended meetings; and (vi) late night meetings and negotiating sessions should be avoided. The paper also suggested that there could be a case for holding all future Ministerial Conferences after Mexico (in 2003) in Geneva to save in cost and effort.

Most Members recognised that the process followed before and at Doha was an improvement over previous negotiations. Many industrialised country Members and some more economically advanced developing county delegations responded negatively to the LMG proposals. They said the LMG provisions would impose too much of a "straight jacket" on the consultation process, with one trade source commenting that were the stricter consultation provisions in the paper adopted, it would drive the real negotiations underground and ultimately lead to a less transparent procedure. Some of these responses came from Norway and Hong Kong-China. Ambassadors from both of these Members -- Kare Bryn and Stuart Harbinson, respectively -- previously served as General Council Chairs and were involved in transparency-related consultations around Ministerial Conferences and other areas in 2000 and 2001.

General Council Chair Sergio Marchi said that the issue would remain on the agenda for the next meeting so that Members could make further formal interventions, then on the basis of these he would engage in further informal consultations on the matter.

Cancun selected as venue for next Ministerial

Ending months of speculation over when and where the next Ministerial Conference would be held, Members agreed on 13 May that the Fifth Ministerial Conference will take place in Cancun, Mexico on 10-14 September, 2003. Cancun was chosen, the Mexican delegation said, because of its hotel zone, which is clustered in such a way that the WTO meeting shouldn't disturb the local population too drastically. Inter alia, the Cancun meeting is the deadline for Members to present draft schedules for agriculture negotiations and to decide on modalities for launching negotiations on the Singapore issues of investment, competition, transparency in government procurement, and trade facilitation. It comes at the midway point in the WTO's mandated Doha negotiations.

Mexican Ambassador Eduardo Perez Motta said Cancun had 20,000 hotel rooms and conference facilities for 6,000. As such, according to WTO sources, the scale of potential participation would likely be closer to Seattle than to Doha, where space constraints led to severe restrictions on possible attendees, including non-governmental participants.

"WTO Ministerial Fixed for Cancun in September 2003," ASSOCIATED PRESS, 13 May 2002; ICTSD Internal Files.