During the first day of WIPO’s Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (SCCR28), the Committee was made aware of the Chair’s (Martin Moscoso, Peru) proposal to invite three experts from the broadcasting industry (1) Alexandre Jobim, International Association of Broadcasting, (2) Premila Manvi Asia-Pacific Broadcasting Union and (3) Erica Redler (North American Broadcasters Association). Venezuela, noted,
I am taken aback by your proposal to invite 3 experts from the broadcasting organizations to sit in the informals. We have reservations inviting industry experts to broadcasting informals. Who are these broadcasting experts who will solve what we couldn’t fix for 15 years?
Uruguay, the outgoing coordinator of the Latin American and Caribbean Group (GRULAC) delivered the following intervention:
URUGUAY: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. We have not planned to speak to this issue, but I felt that I should briefly refer to this, because after the statement made by Venezuela, I do feel the need to clarify some issues.
I can of course do this here, but in order to ensure full transparency with my own group, and with those groups with whom we had met, so I believe that it is urgent to discuss this, since I wish to avoid any misunderstanding.
The question of practical presentations, the regional coordinators met on the 12th of June, at the request of the Secretariat to speak to the organization of the work of the 28th session.
I spoke with the Vice Chairman, as to why there were to be technical presentations, and I was told that this is the result of the Chairman’s summary in paragraph 9.
I am of course not against technical presentations in principle. They are a very good thing. But we need to work in a different way, and in a more transparent manner. On that day, and the regional coordinators can confirm this, we must agree first, as to the way in which the session is going to work, rather than bring people who will not be able to participate and will not be able to make their presentation, because their session will not be held.
Why should we spend the money to bring somebody here to waste their time, when there may be no agreement. We were given a week. On the 27th of June we met again., and there I stated that we needed to agree on this, that and other issues before we come to a conclusion. One of them was the division of time, the basis of our future work, and whether we would have technical presentations or not.
A number of views were expressed, some people felt it should be during the session, some off line. And on the basis of future work, and the division of time, we were told and I quote, that we didn’t need to call upon a technicians, and nor would we ask the Secretariat to look for such a technical experts.
So you can imagine my astonishment when I saw that there are three technical experts at this session. If regional coordinators are consulted on four occasions, and on two of those occasions we discuss the question of technical presentations, and we responded that we did not wish to have such technical presentations, as long as though we had not come to decision on the other issues, so I really feel that it is most inappropriate to tell us that there would be technical experts present on the bench as it were, ready to provide support should we need it.
I wanted to make this clear, because my GRULAC colleagues will be wondering what on earth I was doing at those meetings with the Secretariat, when having told them afterwards that we were not going to have technical presentations, and here they are.
So I would, GRULAC would expect to be informed that these people were going to be present. Perhaps we would have been less astonished if we had been told ahead of time of the presence of experts.
But Mr. Chairman, we must ensure that there is more transparency in future, and to avoid confusion. Thank you.