# Council Decision of 30 May 2005 approving the accession of the European Community to the International Convention for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants, as revised at Geneva on 19 March 1991 (2005/523/EC), Article 6: Novelty


1. (Criteria) The variety shall be deemed to be new if, at the date of filing of the application for a breeder’s right, propagating or harvested material of the variety has not been sold or otherwise disposed of to others, by or with the consent of the breeder, for purposes of exploitation of the variety,
(i) in the territory of the Contracting Party in which the application has been filed earlier than one year before that date,
and
(ii) in a territory other than that of the Contracting Party in which the application has been filed earlier than four years or, in the case of trees or of vines, earlier than six years before the said date.
2. (Varieties of recent creation) Where a Contracting Party applies this Convention to a plant genus or species to which it did not previously apply this Convention or an earlier Act, it may consider a variety of recent creation existing at the date of such extension of protection to satisfy the condition of novelty defined in paragraph (1) even where the sale or disposal to others described in that paragraph took place earlier than the time limits defined in that paragraph.
3. (Territory in certain cases) For the purposes of paragraph 1, all the Contracting Parties which are member States of one and the same intergovernmental organisation may act jointly, where the regulations of that organisation so require, to assimilate acts done on the territories of the States members of that organisation to acts done on their own territories and, should they do so, shall notify the Secretary-General accordingly.

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Source: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/eudn/2005/523/attachment/1/article/6 (the official version)
Page: https://openlegislation.uk/eu-decision-2005-523/attachment-1/article-6
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Source: legislation.gov.uk, The National Archives.