 Your Excellency, Ambassador Yanis Kirkland, Chair of the WIPO General Assembly, Honourable Ministers, Your Excellencies, the Permanent Representatives and Ambassadors, Distinguished Delegates. A very good morning to you all. It's a great pleasure for me to join Ambassador Kirkland, the Chair of the WIPO General Assembly, in extending a very warm welcome to all Delegations to the 2016 Assemblies. I should like at the outset to thank all Member States for their support for the organisation, which is so apparent in the large number of participants here at the Assemblies, and also in the extensive range of cultural and professional events that have been so generously organised by so many of the Member States to take place throughout this week. I congratulate Ambassador Kirkland on his appointment as Chair of the Assemblies, and I look very much forward to working with him over the coming week and coming year. I should also like to extend my thanks to the outgoing Chair, Ambassador Gabriel Duque, for his very dedicated and committed leadership in the course of the past 12 months, and I send to him my very best wishes for his new posting. Very good progress has been made across the organisation in the course of the last 12 months. The financial results of the organisation are outstanding. We ended the 2014-2015 biennium with a surplus of 70 million Swiss francs. The net assets of the organisation grew and stood at the end of last year at 280 million Swiss francs, and we are tracking well in the current 2016-2017 biennium. While it is still too early in both the year and the biennium to give estimates of likely results, we are confident that the results of this first year of the biennium 2016 will be positive and will yield a surplus. While the financial condition of the organisation is very sound, there is however little room for complacency in this regard in this area. The outlook for the world economy remains risk-prone and uncertain. The organisation's budget is in Swiss francs, with the consequence that negative interest rates remain a challenge for Treasury management, and exchange rates are a constant risk factor that needs to be managed. In addition, the immediate horizon sees the likelihood of increasing expenditure in the information technology systems that underlie the revenue-generating global IP systems that the organisation administers, as well as in the areas of safety and security, including cybersecurity. The global IP systems, the PCT, the Madrid system and the Hague system all performed well. Their geographical coverage continued to expand, although there are still regions in the world that are significantly underrepresented in the Madrid and Hague systems. Like the geographical coverage, the user base of the systems continued to deepen and to evolve in line with recent trends in economic capacity and performance worldwide. In the Patent Cooperation Treaty, for example, 43%, 43.5% of all international patent applications filed under the PCT originated in Asia, compared to 27.6% from North America and 27% from Europe. The system that is undergoing the most rapid development is the Hague system. After decades of somewhat indifferent performance, applications under the Hague system grew by 40% in 2015 as a result of the recent accessions of several major economies, and we expect in 2016 an increase of a similar magnitude. A major cause for celebration was the entry into force last week on September 30 of the Marrakesh Treaty to facilitate access to published works for persons who are blind, visually impaired or otherwise print disabled. I should like to thank the 20 contracting parties whose accessions brought the treaty into effect, and in particular India, which led the way with the deposit of the first instrument of ratification, Latin America, which constituted the region with the largest number of countries represented in the initial 20 contracting parties, and Australia and Canada, the first developed countries to exceed to the treaty. We've also made significant progress with the accessible books consortium, a partnership of all relevant stakeholders that supports practically the aims of the Marrakesh Treaty through the exchange of books in accessible formats, capacity building, and the promotion of accessible publishing. The ABC has so far facilitated the loans of accessible books to 100,000 visually impaired people across the world through its 19 participating libraries in at present 16 countries. It currently contains some 320,000 titles in more than 76 languages, and participating libraries saved about 11 million United States dollars in production costs for a book read aloud by a person by being able to download some 5,500 electronic books into their collections. A great many other positive results have been achieved by the organization in the past year in many fields. The global databases and IT platforms and systems managed by the organization have expanded in both functionality and in use across the world. The Global Innovation Index, which is jointly produced by the organization and our other economic and statistical reports have received significant worldwide recognition. Our technical assistance and capacity building programs across the organization have experienced continually growing demand. These and other results or results in other areas are described in detail in my written report, and I shall not enter into the details of them here this morning. I should like only to repeat the tribute that I paid in the written report to the talented and dedicated staff of the organization, who have made so many of these achievements possible. Looking to the future, some of the most important challenges lie as always in the advancement of the normative program. On the agenda of these assemblies, as Ambassador Kirklands has already mentioned, is the proposed design law treaty. Two issues remained unresolved at the time of the last assemblies that prevented the convening of a diplomatic conference to conclude the treaty this year in 2016. The Standing Committee on the Law of Trademarks, Industrial Designs and Geographical Indications earlier this year came very close to reaching an agreed position on those two outstanding issues. There was widespread agreement on a common approach with only isolated resistance. I very much hope that the member states will be able to bridge the remaining difference in this meeting and thus enable the convening of the diplomatic conference to conclude the treaty in 2017 next year. Such a result would build confidence for the important work that needs to be accomplished in other areas of the normative program, and allow me please to mention just two such other areas. The first is intellectual property and traditional knowledge, traditional cultural expressions and genetic resources. At last year's assemblies, two of the member states established a very ambitious work program for the Intergovernmental Committee that manages this area. Steady progress has been made to date this year in the IGC, the Intergovernmental Committee, but it's very clear that a concentrated effort at a political level will be required in the coming year in order to report positive results to the assemblies in 2017. I would thus urge the member states to make this effort and to do so in a spirit of compromise so that this long-standing item may be brought to a successful conclusion. Another long-standing item in the normative program is broadcasting. Like traditional knowledge, it does not arise for decision at this year's assemblies, and while some further progress has been made in both the technical understanding of the issues and in defining a way forward, the time I think has come after 20 years now for member states to decide in a definitive manner what they wish to do with this item, and I hope that the coming year will see such a resolution demonstrated on the part of the member states. Looking further into the future, I believe that the principal challenge that the organisation faces is complexity. The nature of intellectual property itself and its role in the economy, in its role in an economy in which value resides increasingly in intellectual assets, and in which technology and innovation are developing at accelerating speeds, is now inherently more complex. This development is raising fundamental questions about the fitness of old categories to new phenomena, which we see reported on almost a daily basis in many areas ranging from the creative industries to the life sciences. This subject matter complexity is developing in a world of great asymmetries in knowledge capacity. A number of our member states have pre-industrial economies and may be preoccupied with such questions as the transition from subsistence agriculture to commercial agriculture, and they may quite legitimately strive to see the ways in which intellectual property may be relevant to their challenges. Other member states have economies that are post-industrial, and their intellectual property is central to their competitive model and to their competitive advantage. And in between there are of course economies with mixed models with areas of excellence in science and technology, but otherwise a commodities profile or intermediate manufacturing capacity. There is a second type of complexity that has developed partly or even largely as a result of the first subject matter complexity and the accelerating speed of development of technology and innovation. And this second subject matter I think is institutional complexity. Because intellectual property is central to the economic strategy of many economies, and because it concerns subject matter that is moving at lightning speed, these economies have naturally sought to advance their interests and to address questions emerging wherever the opportunity presents itself. And in consequence I think we've seen the emergence of extremely active agendas in the field of intellectual property at the national level, at the bilateral level, at the regional level, at the plural lateral level and at the multilateral level. And in an age of globalization all of these agendas affect each other. For example a national law will affect all those trading into that market. Many questions I think arise out of this complexity, but the central one for the future of this organization is the role of the multilateral in this new landscape of multi-speed and multi-tiered complexity. It's a design question really. What is the value added by the multilateral level and what can or should be done at the multilateral level as opposed to other levels, the other very active levels? And will multilateral organizations like ours remain or become, rather, become paralyzed by complexity, or will they find ways to contribute to the management of complexity that provides its benefits for the full range of diverse membership that a multilateral organization encompasses?