Good morning:

Allow me to respond to and comment on our recent thread. Much of what I have to contribute today has already been mentioned in recent PDP and WT5 conference calls and related Chats.
The general position is motivated by three fundamental considerations:

- the right to use a geographical name pertains in the first instance to the people who live there, and have often done so for hundreds of years. It is a matter of identity, and to qualify those rights as a fantasy would appear to many people to be quite frivolous.

- the entities exercising those rights need not be central governments, who may yet do so by default. I would prefer to see a system based on subsidiarity and devolution

- whatever régime is finally adopted, it should be future-proof. These issues today are not what they were 20 years ago. Nor are they what they will become in 20 years time.

These considerations are set out in more detail in the attached paper, which I shall copy to the List in a separate posting.

Regards

Christopher Wilkinson