Summary

  • Europe proposes adding misconduct complaints against ITU elected officials or Oversight Unit staff to the Independent Management Advisory Committee’s written remit.
  • The same draft protects members from personal liability for collective advice and requires ITU indemnity for good-faith, duly careful committee acts.

An accusation against the person at the top cannot simply land in the usual in-house investigation tray. The ITU’s 2024 Oversight Charter routes allegations against elected officials to the Council chair and the chair of its Independent Management Advisory Committee, or IMAC. Allegations against Oversight Unit personnel go to the Secretary-General, who seeks IMAC advice. The charter gives the committee a place in both exceptional routes. Now Europe’s addendum 30, filed under ITU contribution 75, would put that place into Resolution 162 itself.

The 2022 version of Resolution 162 gave IMAC a wide view of audits, risk, ethics and the investigation function. Its members can obtain records and speak to staff. The committee gives advice to the Council and Secretary-General; the resolution leaves management and executive decisions elsewhere. Europe’s new clause is deliberately narrower than a power to investigate: IMAC would contribute to the handling of complaints involving elected officials or Oversight Unit staff under the applicable ITU legal framework. That reference matters because the charter already specifies who receives the allegation and who develops referral procedures.

The second change concerns the people giving the advice. The draft says members would carry no personal liability for advice, opinions or recommendations made by the committee collectively. It also proposes that the Union indemnify them against claims arising from acts performed for the committee when those acts were in good faith and with due care. The two protections have different triggers: collective advice on one side, careful official acts on the other.

There is an institutional backstory. IMAC’s 2025 annual report said it was revisiting its terms because the Oversight Unit and charter had changed the machinery around it. Addendum 30 writes that machinery into the committee’s founding resolution. It also adds a finance-control recommendation duty tied to Decision 5, where the Council already called for IMAC, the external auditor and a working group to develop recommendations.

The November Plenipotentiary will decide whether those lines survive. The useful question is practical: when a complaint takes the exceptional route, what work belongs to IMAC, what record reaches the Council, and what protection follows the advisers who sign their names to the recommendation?

Sources