Friday, January 19, 2007

After the non-papers, here come the "non-conclusions" (to quote Jason Pielemeier)

by Manon Ress
My quick notes from DAY 3 of SCCR Special Session 1 Geneva January 19, 2007

The plenary started right before lunch break. (I know, sounds funny) The Chair provided us with his "draft conclusions". He instructed the delegations to talk about his conclusions during lunch and to come back at 3pm with reactions. However, Columbia, Brazil, India, the EU wanted the floor. Brazil and India made excellent interventions.

Brazil stated that now they wanted to be on the record (since yesterday nothing is on record!) that they want a blanket reservation on their position on non-papers and informal sessions. They had additional comments on the draft conclusions: there should not be reference to a revised 15/2 since there was no agreement on what was revised. They asked that the conclusions reflect that by replacing "revised 15/2" by "revised non-papers".

Also somewhat inappropriate is the list of matters in paragraph 2 of the chair's draft conclusions. Since the previous meetings were informal and not on the record...there is no record of where each issue (objectives, relation to other treaties, definitions, beneficiaries, rights, L&E, term and TPM/DRM) stand and thus no way to see a trend. Finally, the last papragraph amended by the chair at the beginning of session looked like a re-writting of the carefully crafted mandate that came out of the GA. I found also very interesting Brazil's request that there be a "process", a "member driven process" by which member states could provide input (non-papers?).

So far, only the chair is contributing with non-papers and I heard yesterday a "non-slide" about the objective of the treaty.

The chair did not want "too many to speak" but had to let India make its statement. Asking for clarification, India describe how the list of matters did not reflect agreement and was just a list of matters that have been discussed for years. According to the mandate, only matters where agreement was reached should be listed.

The plenary ended on that note. People here are puzzled. If you only point to agreement (on or off the record it seems), the non-conclusions might end up very very short. Would that mean that this meeting did not really happen? Like a non-meeting?

However, some people seem to be happy and are sure that the tanker (that is one of the image used to describe the treaty here!) cannot be sunk.

More later.

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