 Mr Duké, Chair of the WIPO General Assembly, Honourable Ministers, Your Excellencies, the Permanent Representatives and Ambassadors and Distinguished Delegates. It's a great pleasure for me to join the Chair of the WIPO General Assembly in extending a very warm welcome to you all here to the 2015 assemblies. I thank you all for your participation. We have over 1,000 delegates registered for the assemblies, and as Ambassador Duké has mentioned, in addition to a very full agenda, we have an extensive program of culture and other events, some 15 of them hosted by Member States, which I think is a very good sign of the very active engagement and support for the organisation on the part of the Member States. I'd like to thank the outgoing Chair of the General Assembly, Ambassador Pavey Kairama, for all of her support and her guidance over the course of the last two years. I congratulate on his election the new Chair, Ambassador Duké, and my colleagues and I look very much forward to working with you in the course of the next two years. I'd like to take this opportunity also to thank him for all of the energy and skill that he devoted to the task of chairing the Programme Budget Committee of WIPO also. And it is an occasion for me to extend thanks in addition to the chairs of all the other WIPO bodies and the facilitators of the various WIPO processes for the very considerable time and effort that they have devoted to advancing the work of the organisation. There has been great progress and a number of positive developments in many areas of the organisation's work in the course of the past 12 months. This is all set out in detail, great detail, in my report, which will be available immediately outside the conference hall. And I'll refer now only to some of the highlights of that work and to some of the main trends of the context in which the organisation is now operating. The organisation continues to enjoy a sound and even fortunate financial condition. We completed the first year of the current 2014-2015 biennium with an overall surplus of 37 million Swiss francs. We are now 75% through the second year of this biennium and the results indicate that we may expect to achieve a good overall surplus for the whole of the biennium. The healthy financial condition of the organisation is a consequence primarily of the rising interest in and demand for intellectual property as knowledge, technology and creative works move to the centre of the contemporary economy and as governments respond by orienting economic strategies to innovation and to creativity. Intellectual property is a necessary, although not a sufficient, conditioned or component of a successful innovation ecosystem and successful creative industry environments. This major trend towards the increased value of intangibles and intellectual capital is driving our global IP systems, the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the Madrid System for the International Registration of Marx and the Hague System for the International Registration of Designs, which are the source of 95% of the income of the organisation and under which this year we expect to receive some 220,000 international patent applications, around 50,000 international trademark applications and a much smaller but very rapidly growing number of international design applications. The geographical participation in these systems continues to evolve in line with more general economic trends. Asia is now the major origin of international patent applications, accounting for some 40% of the total international patent applications that we receive as against 30% for North America and 27% for Europe. As administrators of these systems, we are focused on the quantity of services that we render under them, both to national and regional IP officers and to users, on enhancing the efficiency and the friendliness of their electronic environments and on improving productivity. And I'm very pleased to be able to recall that we've managed to maintain both staff and fee levels at a constant level now for the last seven years. I'd like to draw attention to some important advances that we've made in the soft infrastructure that underlies the operation of the intellectual property system worldwide, our global databases and our information technology platforms, systems and tools. This is not a very glamorous area, but I would beg your indulgence to mention it for two reasons, really. The first is that it may be noted that the various platforms that the organisation is providing are increasingly forming part of a single global IP platform or global IP infrastructure platform that will in the coming years becoming increasingly or more and more integrated. It will serve the interests of governments, of users and the interested public alike by increasing efficiency and cost effectiveness and transparency of IP systems as well as by enhancing the quality of outcomes in the operation of the IP system worldwide. Second reason for mentioning them is that many of these platforms and systems represent a very good example of the implementation of the goal of the development agenda to mainstream development in the work of the organisation. Much of the work is oriented towards the inclusion of developing countries and to building their capacity to use and to participate in the IP system. The work is also performed outside our development sector in a strict or formal sense. Our IP office administration system, IPAS, is a very good example of this, I think. It supports the processing of IP applications in some 70 countries now. The overwhelming majority of which are developing countries and it provides connectivity into a variety of global facilities. We believe that our new project in the area of collective management of copyright, WIPO Connect, will do the same thing in providing opportunities for the distribution of creative works of developing countries globally. A number of important initiatives are also bearing fruit in the area of public-private partnerships and I would like to mention in particular here WIPO Research which exists for sharing intellectual property and unpublished scientific data for capacity and for capacity building in order to advance drug discovery in the areas of neglected tropical diseases, malaria and tuberculosis. WIPO Research now has 94 members from developed and developing countries and it has produced some 89 collaborations between them for sharing intellectual property on a free basis. We have also several important partnerships with publishers. Access to research and development for innovation, RD, offers free or affordable access to scientific and technical journals in LDCs, least developed countries and in developing countries. The number of users has now grown from 300 to 500 institutions in 72 countries which have access to over 20,000 scientific and technical journals, books and reference works either on a free basis or on a very modest cost basis. It's a member of the United Nations Public-Private Partnership Research for Life. Similarly, access to specialised patent information, ASPE, that partnership provides users in LDCs and developing countries with access to commercial databases. Lastly, let me mention the Accessible Books Consortium which has made great progress in providing a practical vehicle for implementing the objectives of the Marrakesh Treaty. In its first year of operation, the ABC or the Accessible Books Consortium, the Book Service, has facilitated the lending of 31,000 texts or books to persons who are print disabled and has achieved a number of other significant milestones. In each of these public-private partnerships, the private sector is making available or is donating financial and intellectual resources and in each of them the beneficiary is persons and institutions, the major beneficiary is persons and institutions in developing countries and again I cite them because they're a good example of the mainstreaming of development, one of the objectives of the development agenda since they have all been managed and developed or developed and managed outside our formal development sector. Now, the emphasis that we place on our infrastructure platforms and systems and on the success of public-private partnerships may sometimes be interpreted as a desire or an attempt to reduce the importance of the organisation's normative programme or to replace it with practical projects and I believe that this would be a very inaccurate interpretation. By emphasising these areas this morning, I simply wish to draw attention to the fact that in an interconnected world, international cooperation can take many forms and IP platforms and other soft infrastructure projects as well as public and private partnerships offer enormous possibilities for cooperation in a world in which over three billion people are connected, especially in our area of intangibles, knowledge, technology and creative works and I think there's much that we can learn from the private sector's exploitation of this potential of the interconnected world where we see for example that Facebook has over one billion users or Baidu has over 500 million persons actively using it. Now that said, there is and always will be a place for treaties and other normative cooperation. They do after all provide the framework in which both the public and the private sectors can operate but I think we must face the fact that the normative area is the most challenging one as Ambassador Kairan has mentioned at the outset and the one in which the organisation has the greatest difficulty in moving forward and the lack of capacity to agree is often lamented here in Geneva and in various places around the world and I think there are various explanations for it but in our area of intellectual property, let me offer three that I think worth bearing in mind. The first is a consequence of the increased value of intangibles and intellectual capital that I mentioned at the outset. At the same time as this increased value is driving our demand for our global systems, it's also making innovation the focus of competition between enterprises, between industries and between countries and naturally it is harder to come to agreement on intellectual property in this context than it is in a world ruled by physical resources and capital. I think a second explanation is the enormous asymmetries that exist in the distribution of knowledge and technology across the world and in the capacity to generate innovation. This has always existed but it's accentuated in a world in which knowledge, technology and innovation capacity have become central resources. The increased value of intellectual capital and its centrality to competition also mean that economies that do wish to trade in intangibles and to advance their competitive positions and advantage in this area are impatient to put in place the regulatory regimes that will facilitate that and thus we see very active agendas on the bilateral, plural, regional levels as well as the multilateral level and this simply did not exist 20 or 30 years ago and this more complex architecture naturally tends to suck oxygen out of the multilateral space. I believe that these developments require us all to think much more carefully about and to identify really with greater precision what can or should be done at the multilateral level because clearly not everything can be done at the multilateral level but just as clearly some things do need or should be done at the multilateral level. The immediate challenge before the member states now is the agenda of these assemblies where there are some real differences over a number of items. I think that to the extent that you the member states are able to agree on these issues which will require a real effort and some compromise in initial positions. The organisation will be in a much fitter and better condition to engage on the larger question of identifying a future agenda that embraces some of the realities that underline the difficulties that the organisation confronts in moving forward in the normative agenda. In concluding I would like to return to a positive note of the progress made in the course of the last 12 months and to pay tribute to the role of the senior management team and the staff of WIPO for the work that they have done in supporting and advancing that progress. I believe that we have a very talented and dedicated staff at WIPO and I'd like to express my gratitude to them for their excellent work. Thank you very much.