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On November 14,2001, the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization, meeting in Doha, Qatar, adopted the Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health (Doha Declaration). The declaration affirms that the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights "can and should be interpreted and implemented in a manner supportive of WTO Members' right to protect public health and, in particular, to promote access to medicines for all," and it reaffirms that the Agreement "provide[s] flexibility for this purpose." The Doha Declaration mandated further negotiations on one important subject, providing in its paragraph 6: "We recognize that WTO Members with insufficient or no manufacturing capacities in the pharmaceutical sector could face difficulties in making effective use of compulsory licensing under the TRIPS Agreement. We instruct the Council for TRIPS to find an expeditious solution to this problem … ."

Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), which allows a state that is not a party to the Statute to "accept the exercise of jurisdiction by the Court" by way of a declaration lodged with the registrar, is one of the Statute's most inconspicuous provisions. It has attracted only brief notice either in the general literature on the jurisdiction of the ICC or in the particular context of the debate over U.S. objections to the Court's third-party jurisdiction. Few writers have looked closely at the provision's construction and procedural regime, and the first declaration made by a state under this provision—by the Ivory Coast in February 2005—has gone almost unnoticed in international theory and practice.