Summary

  • ITU Plenary Document 34-E says 12 Member States were not entitled to vote until the stated situation was rectified, based on its position on 1 October 2026.
  • All 12 carry the arrears marker A; Antigua and Barbuda and Naoero also carry the non-signatory marker NS. The document does not establish each State’s status on the day a PP-26 ballot is held.

The number is easy to flatten into a permanent exclusion list. The document itself is narrower. In the corrected 34-E, issued by the Secretary-General for the Plenary and dated 7 October, the stated position is 1 October. It says that, until the relevant situation is rectified, the 12 listed Member States will not be entitled to vote. The ITU document page records that the file was replaced on 8 October because of a small typo; the available record does not say that the roster changed.

The table’s marks matter. A means the State is in arrears in payments to the Union. Every entry has A. NS means non-signatory; Antigua and Barbuda and Naoero have both NS and A. Those two are not a separate group of two while the other ten have no arrears: the published table marks all 12 for arrears, with a second status marker on two.

In the document’s English alphabetical order, the entries are Antigua and Barbuda; Cameroon; the Central African Republic; Dominica; Equatorial Guinea; Guyana; Lebanon; Naoero; Sierra Leone; Somalia; Venezuela; and Yemen. ITU’s source table uses fuller constitutional country labels for several entries, including Republic of Naoero. It does not publish individual arrears amounts in this roster. Readers should therefore avoid turning the marks into a ranking of debt, a judgment about a State’s conduct, or an explanation of why a payment or treaty instrument has not been recorded.

The date is as important as the count. The ITU’s PP-26 election-procedures page says Member States must maintain the voting right described in the Constitution and have delegations duly accredited under the Convention. Its separate credentials guidance describes a process that remains subject to the Credentials Committee and Plenary. Document 34-E is one public status record within that process. It is not itself a credentials decision, an attendance list, a proxy record, or a forecast of the ballot denominator.

The conference is scheduled for 9–27 November in Doha, and the election process is set to begin on 12 November, according to ITU’s election backgrounder. A position dated 1 October cannot establish whether a listed condition will remain unresolved several weeks later. Nor does the document say when a further roster will be issued. The evidence supports the count and the date printed on the page; it does not support a claim about any later correction, cure, vote, or result.

The point of publishing the list is practical: delegates and observers can see the status basis ITU has recorded ahead of the conference. Its value depends on preserving that time boundary. A dated record informs scrutiny, but should not be silently recast as a live register when circumstances can change.

Sources