On Monday 30 October, the Spanish Presidency of the Council of the EU informed the delegations within the Special Committee on Agriculture (SCA) of the content of the provisional agreement reached with the European Parliament on 24 October, which was welcomed by a large majority of the delegations (see EUROPE 13279/14).
The issues examined during the fruitful trilogue included the wine package, traditional terms and the role of the European Union Intellectual Property Office (EUIPO), according to the Spanish Presidency.
In the case of wine, the regulation on geographical indications will cover durability, the registration, amendment, cancellation and objection procedure, protection, producer groups and recognised producer groups.
The EUIPO will be able to carry out two purely administrative tasks (in addition to invalidating trademarks in breach of GI protection): creating and managing an information and alert system for domain names, and managing the Union’s GI register.
As far as traditional terms are concerned, an application for registration of traditional terms that contravenes the GI Regulation will be rejected, if this application was filed after the date of the application for registration of the GI. The agreement reached at the trilogue is limited to applications received by the Commission after the date of application of the Geographical Indications Regulation and is not retroactive.
The Spanish Presidency of the Council explained that further technical work was required before the consolidated text could be presented to the SCA for approval (scheduled for the end of November). Once the SCA has approved the political agreement, the text will be finalised from a legal/linguistic point of view (this stage should take around 12 weeks), before it can be formally adopted (around February 2024). The text will enter into force 20 days after it is published in the Official Journal of the EU. (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)