WORLD TRADE
ORGANIZATIONG/L/635
9 July 2003
(03-3716)
Council for Trade in Goods
COUNCIL FOR TRADE IN GOODS
Report to the General Council on the Work Programme on Electronic Commerce
1. In paragraph 34 of the Doha Ministerial Declaration, Ministers agreed to continue the Work
Programme on Electronic Commerce, and instructed the General Council to consider the most
appropriate institutional arrangements for handling the Work Programme on Electronic Commerce
and to report on further progress to the Fifth Session of the Ministerial Conference.  Pursuant to this
mandate, the General Council agreed at its meeting on 15 October 2002 to maintain, for the duration
of the work until the Fifth Ministerial Conference, the current institutional arrangements for handlingthe Work Programme on Electronic Commerce, namely that the Councils for Trade in Services, Trade
in Goods, and TRIPS, and the Committee on Trade and Development would examine and report on
aspects of electronic commerce relevant to their respective areas of competence, and that the General
Council would play a central role in the entire  process, would keep the Work Programme under
continuous review and would consider any trade-related issue of a cross-cutting nature.
2. Since the Doha Ministerial Conference, th e Council for Trade in Goods (CTG) had not
undertaken any discussion under the Work Programme on Electronic Commerce due to the fact that
the horizontal issues remained under discussion in the General Council.  At its meeting on 12 June
2003, the Committee took note of the Chairman's statement that the CTG had gone as far as it could
on the technical goods matters given the unresolved horizontal issues, most importantly the
classification issue, that were under consideration in the dedicated discussions on cross-cutting issuesunder the auspices of the General Council.
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