The Chairman drew the Committee's attention to document G/MA/SPEC/17 which contained the draft periodic report of the Committee. This report, which would be finalized in the light of the discussion today, would be submitted to the Council for Trade in Goods for examination at its meeting of 18 April 2001. The report summarized the factual information on waivers in Annexes I and II. Since the issuance of this document, requests for waiver extensions were also received from Morocco and Switzerland, thus they should be added to Annex I. All waivers would expire on 30 April 2001.
1.2 As concerned the HS96 waiver, a draft decision on a further extension was circulated in document G/C/W/255 dated 19 March 2001. To date, 20 Members had forwarded to the Secretariat requests for the extension of their waivers. The list of those Members is reproduced in both documents G/C/W/255 and Annex I of G/MA/SPEC/17. He noted there were several informal consultations held on the format of the HS96 waivers. At the formal meeting of 12 October 2000, certain delegations had stated that it was time to change the present system of a collective decision for HS96 waiver extensions to individual waiver decisions. Certain other Members were not in favour of this approach. Thus, at the informal meeting of the Committee on 2 February, this subject was taken up and further consultations were held. As a result, on 19 March, an agreement was reached whereby the waiver to be granted would be the last collective waiver issued for a period of one year, instead of the usual six months. Additionally, the Decision states that all documentation must be provided. All of these changes were reflected in the new draft decision, document G/C/W/255.