At Tuesday’s morning plenary session of the WIPO Development Agenda, Ambassador Trevor Clarke (Chair) of Barbados set the out the seating arrangements for the informal “green room” style negotiations in which consensus is expected to by hammered out, cluster by cluster.
The Chair noted that
a number of regional coordinators approached me yesterday about challenges they are having – about the number of delegates that they wish to bring to the negotiations upstairs. In my view these sort of negotiations are best done with a small number of people.
Recognizing the responsibility of the regional coordinators, we need to do something about the numbers attending the informal sessions.
There was an additional situation yesterday because China arrived, and it is true that there were a lot of them, but there was not a single seat
for the Regional Coordinator – and we treat China as its own group.
To address these concerns, the Chair tabled the following proposal for Members’ consideration. The green room has the capacity to seat 31 people around the table. One of the seats is reserved for the chair and 3 seats are reserved for the WIPO Secretariat. Thus, in effect 27 seats have been allocated to regional groups.
Here is the breakdown:
The Chair noted that there were 8-10 seats on side, so each group could safely bring one extra person on the side. He expresssed his desire in getting the right people around the table in order to get the negotiations done. It should be noted that the members of the Friends of Development also belong to the GRULAC, African Group and Asian Group regions.
One negotiator observed that Italy (Group B coordinator), the United States, Germany and Switzerland were 4 of the 5 Group B countries participating in the green room negotiations.