Industrial design rights in the European Union of industrial design rights is required by the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS, Arts. 25 & 26), to which the European Union is a party. The Regulation on Community designs provides for the recognition of the priority date of an application for design right registration in a country which is either a member of the World Trade Organization or a party to the Paris Convention for the Protection of Industrial Property. On 1 January 2008, the European Union became a party to the Geneva Act of the Hague Agreement Concerning the International Registration of Industrial Designs
European Commissioner for Trade a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in its own right since the WTO was founded on 1 January 1995, alongside its member states. (Until 1 December 2009, it held WTO membership under the name European Communities rather than European Union.) The EU forms its own customs union with a common external tariff and commercial (external trade) policy: this means that at the WTO the EU operates as a single actor with the European Commission representing the EU. EU trade policy is decided by "the Article 133 committee" (EU trade policy is based on Article 133 of the EU