Dear all
first of all, in regard to the initiative of Article 4a (the petition) please do NOT run any communication that somebody from the member states or from the EPO or any other external expert had any idea. This idea originated only from internal discussions of no patents on seeds. Please.
But after talking to some non-existing external experts, I have the impression we should be a little bit more cautious in our wording.
We should ask ourselves why no such conference has been taken place (in fact nobody seems to know).
The answer could be that there is agreement among all member states that so far no such conference was needed an that therefore the Meeting of the Admin Council was regarded as being sufficient: maybe some meetings of the Admin Council had a specific additional function (being seen as equivalent to the meeting of the ministers).
So we should not insist that this is breach of law and that no such conference has been taken place. Instead we should say 'to our knowledge' these conferences did not take place.
In the end it does not matter, because our demand to organise the conference to take political control is absolutely correct.
I will shortly go through our drafts and in case needed, I will send some suggestion for changes.
Christoph