9. The Commission received reports concerning the 14th and 15th sessions of the Executive Committee held in Rome from 17 to 19 September 1969 and on 3 April 1970, respectively. In introducing these reports, the Chairman indicated that most of the substantive items considered by the Executive Committee would be dealt with by the Commission under the agenda items relating to the matters concerned. The Report of the Fifteenth Session of the Executive Committee is reproduced as Appendix II to this Report.
10. The Commission was informed that a meeting of an ad hoc Group of Experts, which had been convened by the Directors-General of FAO and WHO to elaborate a first draft code of hygienic practice for meat, had taken place at WHO Headquarters, Geneva, from 17 to 20 March 1970. The ad hoc Group of Experts had reached agreement on a first draft code, and this would be sent to governments for their comments as soon as possible, in order that the comments would be available to the Codex Committee on Meat and Meat Products1, which would be considering the draft code (document CX/MMP 70/3, Appendix II) at its next session later in the year.
11. The Commission adopted the uniform system of references for Codex documents, which had been recommended by the Executive Committee at its 14th Session and which appears as Appendix III to this Report. The Executive Committee had considered that the system of references should be regarded as an interpretation of paragraph 9(e) of the Guidelines for Codex Committees, concerning the need to assign consecutive reference numbers in a suitable series to all the documents of Codex Committees. The Commission noted that this system of references for Codex documents would be included in the next (third) edition of the Procedural Manual.
12. The Commission noted that the Executive Committee, at its 15th session, had agreed that, wherever possible, verifiable end-product specifications were preferable, for inclusion in Codex standards, to provisions which were not enforceable by examination of the endproduct. The Commission also noted that the Executive Committee had also agreed that Codex standards could contain provisions such as those relating to conditions of manufacture and raw materials used, which could not be determined by an examination of the end-product. The Commission further noted that the Executive Committee had agreed that this principle applied equally to aspects of Codex standards other than quality criteria.
1 Now renamed the Codex Committee on Meat (see paragraph 177).
