--- title: "One Delegation Chaired Nine Of Fourteen Sessions. It Changed Its Name Four Times." dek: "The chair passes down Schedule 1 in French alphabetical order, and the rotation restarts at the top whenever a session is convened late. Eleven of the last fourteen were. Item 14 has been reached once since 1991, for eleven minutes." kind: column (Column) desk: Off-World author: Ambrose Teague (fictional) published: 2026-08-18T06:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/chair-went-round-the-alphabet tags: Schedule 1, Item 14, procedure, treaty bodies, notification genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # One Delegation Chaired Nine Of Fourteen Sessions. It Changed Its Name Four Times. *The chair passes down Schedule 1 in French alphabetical order, and the rotation restarts at the top whenever a session is convened late. Eleven of the last fourteen were. Item 14 has been reached once since 1991, for eleven minutes.* 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. > **Figure:** Who took the chair, and where they stood on the list — see https://theyburied.com/article/chair-went-round-the-alphabet ## 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. > Item 14 is not reached because it is item fourteen. Any party may move that it be taken second. > > — Solange Achterberg-Vieira 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. ## Sources (invented) - The published rota of the Meeting of Parties, sessions 1–34, The Meeting's own secretariat — Downloaded from the Meeting's website; checked line by line against the printed session reports held in a depositary library (June–July 2026) - Schedule 1 as amended, with four notifications of amendment, Depositary file, Article 22(3) — Requested from the depositary; four one-page forms and their covering letters, five pages in all (July 2026) - Solange Achterberg-Vieira, Secretary to the delegation since 2009 — Interviewed by video call twice, then answered in writing at length (July and August 2026) - Ottoline Marchetti-Sowande, Procedural counsel; drafts rules of procedure for treaty bodies — Interviewed by telephone, having been read Rule 4 and Article 22 cold (31 July 2026) - Eleven of the thirty-two delegations absent from every opening plenary since 1997, Written enquiry — Written to at their notified addresses; three replied (July 2026) ## What we could not confirm - Whether any of the four renamings was made in order to move earlier in Schedule 1. Four administrative reasons exist, all documented, all ordinary. Intent is the single thing this column cannot establish, and it does not claim it. - Opening-plenary attendance before 1996. The sheets for sessions 1 to 8 are not in the depositary set and the secretariat says they were not kept. Every chair counted here is from 2004 on, because that is when the rota was first published. - Whether a different order of business would have produced anything. We can show Item 14 was placed fourteenth at twenty-nine of thirty-one sessions. We cannot show that placing it second would have produced a decision rather than a longer deferral. ## Right of reply **Solange Achterberg-Vieira, secretary to the delegation** (She replied on 11 August 2026 and asked that it run at length. Printed unedited.): > I will take your arithmetic first, because it is correct, and then tell you what I think you have missed. > > Yes. This delegation has chaired nine of the fourteen sessions held since the rota was published. Yes, we have amended our designation four times since 1988, and yes, each amendment moved us earlier in Schedule 1. I checked your figures against ours before our second call and they agree to the session. > > Now the reasons, which you have printed and which I will not pretend are romantic. In 1994 we absorbed a meteorological service and became a Direction. In 2003 the enabling statute was rewritten and we became a Bureau. In 2011 our funding parties reconstituted us and our legal personality changed, so we became an Autorité. In 2019 we adopted the term the Convention's own French text has used for us since 1988, which is Administration, and which we ought to have adopted in 1988. Each change was notified to the depositary on the prescribed form. Each form is one page. Each is public. Your reporter has all four because I sent him the one he could not find. > > I am aware of how the sequence looks written down in a row. I would ask your readers to consider that a body renamed by its funders every eight years is not a body in charge of its own affairs. > > What I would like them told is this. At the opening plenary of the thirty-fourth session there were six delegations in the room out of forty-one. Thirty-two parties have not been represented at an opening plenary since 1997. We attend because attendance was written into our operating budget in 1993 by somebody whose name I do not know, and nobody has taken it out. That is the whole of our advantage. We turn up. > > On Item 14 I will be blunt, because your desk has written about it for years and has never printed the sentence I am about to write. Item 14 is not reached because it is item fourteen. The chair settles the order of business, and every chair settles it in the order the standing agenda gives, because no chair in thirty-eight years has been asked in writing to do otherwise. Any party may move that an item be taken earlier. Twelve parties may compel it. The motion costs nothing, requires no advance seconder and no lawyer. It has been moved once, in 2007, by us, and defeated nine votes to four, and the record of that is in a session report your own newspaper has quoted from twice. > > We would second such a motion tomorrow. We have said so in three communiqués. Nobody has read them, and I do not entirely blame anybody, because I have read them and they are very badly written. > > Your column will tell your readers that our name is the story. I think the story is that a treaty body with forty-one parties can be run by whoever is willing to book the room. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.