The Marrakesh VIP Treaty: Administration and Final Clauses, Articles 13 to 22

In one line

The Marrakesh Treaty uses the standard 1996 machinery but needed only twenty ratifications, and it reached them in three years.

In exam wording: Articles 13 to 22 of the Marrakesh VIP Treaty establish the Assembly of the contracting parties and the role of the International Bureau of WIPO, and govern eligibility for becoming party, rights and obligations, signature, entry into force upon deposit of twenty instruments, effective dates, denunciation, languages and the depositary.

Article 13: the Assembly

The frame is the standard WIPO Assembly clause, and the chapter on the administration of the WIPO Copyright Treaty sets it out in full. Rather than repeat it, this chapter states what Marrakesh does with it and where it departs.

The four features it shares with the 1996 model. An Assembly of the contracting parties, each represented by one delegate assisted by alternates, advisors and experts, at its own expense. A competence over the maintenance, development, application and operation of the Treaty. One vote for each contracting party that is a State, with an intergovernmental organisation voting instead of its member States and never alongside them. And meetings convoked by the Director General, in the absence of exceptional circumstances during the same period and at the same place as the General Assembly of WIPO.

Three features are new or sharpened.

Financial assistance, Article 13(1)(c). The Assembly may ask WIPO to grant financial assistance to facilitate the participation of delegations of contracting parties regarded as developing countries in conformity with the established practice of the General Assembly of the United Nations, or countries in transition to a market economy. That is a beneficiary provision inside an administrative article, and it fits a treaty whose beneficiaries are in those countries.

Consensus, Article 13(5). The Assembly shall endeavour to take its decisions by consensus and shall establish its own rules of procedure, including the convocation of extraordinary sessions, quorum requirements and, subject to the Treaty, the majorities required for various kinds of decision.

The consensus sentence is not in the 1996 treaties, and it records a change of practice in WIPO bodies over the intervening seventeen years.

Admission of organisations, Article 13(2)(b). The Assembly performs the function allocated to it by Article 15(2), which is the admission of certain intergovernmental organisations, so the membership decision is taken by the Assembly rather than by the depositary.

Article 13(2)(c) gives the Assembly the power to decide the convocation of a diplomatic conference for revision and to instruct the Director General on its preparation.

Article 14: the International Bureau

Article 14: the International Bureau of WIPO performs the administrative tasks concerning the Treaty. One sentence, and it is the same sentence the other modern WIPO treaties use.