From http://www.iso.org/iso/pressrelease.htm?refid=Ref1136Related:
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/06/10/2018238

Four national standards bodies appeal against approval of ISO/IEC DIS 29500

 2008-06-06

Four national standards body members of ISO and IEC – Brazil, India, South
Africa and Venezuela – have submitted appeals against the recent approval of
* ISO/IEC DIS 29500, **Information technology – Office Open XML formats*, as
an ISO/IEC International Standard.

In accordance with the ISO/IEC rules governing the work of their joint
technical committee *ISO/IEC JTC 1, Information technology*, the appeals are
currently being considered by the ISO Secretary-General and the IEC General
Secretary who, within a period of 30 days (to the end of June), and
following whatever consultations they judge appropriate, are required to
submit the appeals, with their comments, to the ISO Technical Management
Board and the IEC Standardization Management Board.

The two management boards will then decide whether the appeals should be
further processed or not. If they decide in favour of proceeding, the
chairmen of the two boards are required to establish a conciliation panel
which will attempt to resolve the appeals. The process could take several
months.

According to the ISO/IEC rules, a document which is the subject of an appeal
cannot be published as an ISO/IEC International Standard while the appeal is
going on. Therefore, the decision to publish or not ISO/IEC DIS 29500 as an
ISO/IEC International Standard cannot be taken until the outcome of the
appeals is known.

 Related link

ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives<http://isotc.iso.org/livelink/livelink.exe/fetch/186605/customview.ht...>-
(Appeals are dealt with in Chapter 11)