Guide to TRIPS documents

The TRIPS Agreement includes a set of transparency mechanisms, which require members to furnish extensive information about their IP laws and policies, and details about how IPRs are administered and enforced in their territories; these laws are also reviewed in detail in the TRIPS Council. In addition, the TRIPS Council has itself established a series of reporting processes concerning specific aspects of members’ IP systems. The operation of these transparency mechanisms in the years since 1995 has yielded a uniquely comprehensive and systematic body of information that now covers some 130 jurisdictions (essentially all WTO members other than LDC members, for whom these provisions do not yet apply).