Summary

  • Arab States contribution 91 addendum 39 proposes a dedicated ITU portal where affected Member States and observers can report and update damage, destruction and threats to telecommunications infrastructure.
  • The proposed records would carry location, nature, extent and impact; the ITU Secretariat would analyse submissions and report periodically to Council.

When a network goes down, the first public account is often a sentence: service disrupted. The Arab States’ draft resolution, filed in the ITU conference record, asks for a more useful record. It directs the Secretary-General to establish an electronic portal where affected Member States and observers could register and update reports of damage, destruction and threats to telecommunications infrastructure during armed conflict or disaster. Each report would identify location, nature, extent and impact; the Secretariat would compile and analyse them for periodic Council reports.

The 2022 Resolution 136 already tells the ITU to support emergency communications, early warning, relief and recovery, and to work with humanitarian coordination mechanisms. Addendum 39 addresses a different part of the response: the evidence trail after a network is hit. A standardized filing can put a broken backhaul link, a disabled mobile site and the consequences for relief communications in one comparable record, if contributors supply the details and keep them current.

The submitter and the compiler have different jobs. The proposal gives affected states and observers the route to submit; it gives the ITU Secretariat the job of analysis and periodic reporting. It does not specify a public map, a verification standard, a dispute procedure or a publication clock for individual records. Those design choices will decide whether the portal is useful to responders and whether the Council can distinguish a fresh outage report from a stale one. A precise revision history is as valuable as the first alert.

The draft also asks the three Bureau Directors to identify challenges to life-saving communications and support research and training for resilient networks. The Secretary-General would coordinate with relevant UN bodies, examine additional Secretariat budget needs and report implementation to Council and the next Plenipotentiary Conference. PP-26 still has to vote. If it adopts the text, the practical test begins with the first form: can a network operator’s changing facts travel from an affected place to a Council decision without losing their source or date?

Sources