One Delegation Chaired Nine Of Fourteen Sessions. It Changed Its Name Four Times.

VIENNA, Austria — Nine of the last fourteen sessions have been chaired by the same delegation, under three of its five names.

I did not find it in a leaked document. I found it in the rota, which the Meeting of Parties has published on its own website since 2004, and which I set beside Schedule 1 one evening in July.

The arithmetic took forty minutes. The rota has been open to anybody with a browser for twenty-two years. Nobody had done it.

How the chair is decided

The 1988 Convention on the Notification of Unattributed Aerial and Orbital Objects gives the chair, at each ordinary session, to the delegation next appearing in Schedule 1.

Schedule 1 is the list of parties, alphabetical in French, because French is the drafting language. That is why the order looks scrambled in English, and why nobody gets past the first page.

Rule 4 of the Rules of Procedure adds the part that matters. A delegation not represented at the opening plenary is passed over. And where a session is convened later than the year in which it fell due, the rotation "shall recommence at the head of Schedule 1".

Eleven of the last fourteen sessions were convened late. The Meeting is funded session by session and the money arrives when it arrives.

So the rota does not travel down the list. It keeps going back to the top.

The four amendments

In 1988 this delegation was an Office. It stood twenty-seventh of thirty-nine.

In 1994 it absorbed a meteorological service and became a Direction. Ninth.

In 2003 its enabling statute was rewritten and it became a Bureau. Fifth.

In 2011 its legal personality changed and it became an Autorité. Fourth.

In 2019 it took the word the Convention's own French text uses for it, Administration, and moved ahead of every Agence and Autorité on the list. Third of forty-one.

Each amendment is one form, lodged with the depositary under Article 22(3), signed by the head of delegation, effective on receipt. No debate, no vote, no fee. I have all four; with covering letters they run to five pages.

Twenty-seventh, ninth, fifth, fourth, third.

What the chair can actually do

Rule 6, entire: the chair settles the order of business and may move the adjournment of the session.

That is all of it. No casting vote. No power to rule an item out of order. The chair also takes the minutes and books the room, which is why, on the evidence of six sessions in the gallery, nobody else wants it.

Item 14

The standing agenda has fourteen items. Items 1 to 13 are mandatory and mostly clerical: credentials, arrears, budget, two subsidiary-body reports, the review of the Annex, the dates of the next session.

Item 14 is "consideration of a standing arrangement for the central deposit and notification of unattributed observations". It is the registry — the only item on the agenda that would produce a fact.

It has appeared on the provisional agenda of thirty-one consecutive sessions since 1991. It has been reached once — 14 October 1997, at 4.49 p.m., for eleven minutes — and carried forward.

Sessions run two days. The chair settles the order of business. Item 14 has been placed fourteenth at twenty-nine of those thirty-one sessions.

The secretary's answer

Solange Achterberg-Vieira has been secretary to the delegation since 2009. She took two video calls, checked my figures against hers, and told me they agreed to the session.

She then sent me the 2011 amendment form, which I had not found and had not asked for.

Her full reply runs at the foot of this column, and it takes this one apart.

Two of her points I cannot answer.

The first: at the most recent opening plenary there were six delegations present out of forty-one, and thirty-two parties have not been represented at an opening since 1997. Hers attends because attendance was written into its operating budget in 1993 and nobody has taken it out. "That is the whole of our advantage," she said. "We turn up."

The second is about Item 14.

Any party may move it. Twelve parties may compel it. The motion costs nothing and needs no lawyer. It has been moved once, in 2007, by her delegation, and defeated nine votes to four.

This desk has written about Item 14 four times in four years and did not know that until she told me. It is in a session report we have quoted from twice.

What I take from it

There is no rule against a party renaming itself because nobody drafted one, and nobody drafted one because nobody imagined a party would trouble to file the form. Ottoline Marchetti-Sowande, who drafts rules of procedure for treaty bodies, was read Rule 4 and Article 22 cold and said she had never seen that prohibition drafted, in twenty-six years.

And the chair's powers are trivial. That is not the mitigation it sounds like. Settling the order of business is precisely and only how Item 14 stays at fourteen.

I have sat in that gallery six times. On five of them I was the only person in it. On the sixth there were two of us, and the other one was the interpreter.