"Drafting started six months ago. Now we determined to finish the job. We've come through hard talks. Now we shall join hands with the WTO Secretariat for a third version. It must be ready for negotiators gathering mid-September," Maxim Medvedkov, commercial negotiations department head in Russia's Ministry of Economic Development and Trade, said to Novosti. He leads the Russian delegation in talks on prospective WTO membership.
The team will gather for its nearest session late in October or early November. "We have also scheduled a number of multilateral consultations on tariff quotas, farming, plant sanitary measures, veterinarian control, and technical barriers in trade," added the interviewee.
The talks are making good progress, say a majority of WTO member countries.
"Certain big problems on the agenda are still waiting for settlement-in particular, intellectual property, customs routine and the Customs Code administration. My [foreign] colleagues don't think we Russians are fully complying with our own code. Moth-eaten customs bylaws remain valid [in our country] side-by-side with the new Customs Code. Their coexistence baffles experts, however much we are trying to reassure them that Russia is implementing in practice an overwhelming part of law-administering tools, and it will take quite some time to get them all working."
When debates came to intellectual property, the conferees pointed out that Russian laws do not stipulate counterfeit product manufacturing equipment destroyed.
Another surprise came to the Russian negotiators when Chinese delegates demanded to debate Russian fuel price formation.
"That was something of a thunderbolt-the matter never came up before though negotiations with China have been on for three years now. True, other countries raised it on occasions. We have settled the matter with the European Union, and debates with other partners are going on-but China took up the issue for a first ever time," said Mr. Medvedkov.
Certain WTO countries are dissatisfied with Russia-EU negotiation achievements on the access to financial and telecommunication service markets. Those markets are to open far wider than now, they insist.
Simultaneously with the ad hoc team session, Russian delegates had another Geneva round of bilateral and multilateral negotiations on access to commodity and service markets.
