Summary

  • RCC proposes that ITU Council working groups and their leaders preferably be decided at the extraordinary Council session at the end of a plenipotentiary conference.
  • Its Decision 11 amendment also calls for an early-year in-person meeting with remote access and leaves a possible autumn meeting and its format to a Council decision on a group's proposal.

A plenipotentiary can fill three weeks with decisions. Someone then has to turn them into working-group assignments before the delegates' folders disappear into luggage. RCC addendum 1 would put that handover at the ITU Council's extraordinary session at the end of the conference: decide which Council working groups continue or begin, and who leads them, preferably while the decision-makers are still assembled.

The ITU register posted the Russian proposal on 23 October. In its explanatory note, the sponsors argue that waiting to form groups and appoint leaders can effectively cost a year of work on plenipotentiary decisions. Their draft offers a preferred moment, rather than transferring Council authority to another body. The adopted 2022 Decision 11 already makes Council responsible for groups' terms, leadership and review, while the plenipotentiary or Council decides on creation and continuation as appropriate.

The amendment then follows the group into the calendar. An early-year meeting before the ordinary Council session would be held in person with remote participation, so the group could shape proposals and its yearly report before Council considers them. A second meeting in autumn would happen only if Council agrees to the group's proposal; Council would also choose between another in-person meeting with remote access and a fully virtual one. The sponsors have written a decision-maker into each step instead of treating a second meeting as automatic.

A smaller edit is easy to miss: when multiple working groups have to meet in a cluster, the RCC would prefer that they avoid parallel sessions. Decision 11 already favours bringing meetings into the annual Council session or putting them back-to-back, and it bars them from major ITU conferences and sector advisory-group meetings. A delegate with several group assignments can only occupy one room at a time.

Doha will decide whether to adopt the draft. The first test afterward would be the extraordinary Council record: were groups and leaders settled promptly? Then come the early-year agenda, any Council decision on autumn meetings and the resulting papers for the ordinary session. A clean handover is mundane governance until the missing signature slows an entire work programme.

Official sources