Internal Market Commissioner Frits Bolkestein said: "It is disappointing that some Member States appear to consider that it is acceptable to regularly implement Directives late and to incorrectly apply commonly agreed rules.

14. Welcomes the Declaration on the TRIPS agreement and public health as being an important political re-statement of the rights of individual countries to take overriding action to secure access to affordable drugs to help protect their citizens from pandemics such as the HIV/AIDS crisis, but notes that the terms of the underlying intellectual property agreement, TRIPs, have not been changed; expresses its disappointment that the rights of members to import cheaper medicines from third countries were not juridic ...[+++]ally confirmed and that the re-examination of this key issue will take at least a further twelve months during which time, based on United Nations figures, another 3 million AIDS sufferers will die;

Where, after recalculating the amount of the customs debt on the basis of the rates applicable on the date when the declaration for release into free circulation was accepted, the customs authorities find that the imports in question can no longer benefit from tariff suspension, the customs duties thus recalculated are legally due.

3. On the declaration's being accepted by the competent authorities, who shall insert thereon the date of acceptance, the hindquarters to be boned shall be placed under the supervision of those authorities, who shall establish the net weight of the products and enter this in box 7 of the certificate referred to in paragraph 2.

However, in this particular case it was considered that the licence had certain effects which were incompatible with the conditions laid down in Article 85(3) of the EEC Treaty, notably because there was no effective competition on the market in question, and accordingly, the necessary conditions for an exemption were not fulfilled. Thus, if Tetra Pak had not acceded to Commission pressure to renounce all claims to the exclusivity in question, the Commission would have withdrawn for the first time the benefit of one of its block exemption Regulations and would have declared that the exclusive licence in question infringed Article 85(1). ...[+++]As a consequence of the Commission's action in this case the British Technology Group has stated that it is willing to enter into negotiations with Elopak for a non-exclusive licence to enable Elopak to exploit the new sterilisation technology (1) Commission Regulation 2349/84, see IP (84) 270

Following objections by the Commission, the German and Belgian Governments agreed to permit competition on the grounds that their services differed from those provided by the couriers.