By Toby McIntosh
Once every three years, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) convenes an Assembly, a two-week meeting of all 193 members that is conducted with vastly more transparency than usual for ICAO.
The triennial gathering is a clear bubble atop a dark column.
For Assembly meetings, documents are available in advance and are accessible online to the public. Plus, meetings are open for press coverage and some are broadcast live.
Such transparency contrasts dramatically with the secrecy that prevails during the three-year intervals between Assembly meetings. During these intervals, policies are developed by the 36-member ICAO Council and by standing committees.
Opacity conceals the work of these bodies. No documents are publicly available before ICAO Council meetings or the committee meetings, and virtually none are released afterwards. Their meetings are closed to press coverage. (See previous eyeonglobaltransparency.net report on ICAO).
As a result, most of the policy recommendations funneled to the Assembly were developed in private.
EYE explores this contrast in advance of the upcoming Assembly meeting in Montreal (Sept 24-Oct. 4), and looks at one example – a controversial proposal concerning aviation pollution and climate change.
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Public Documents Released for Assembly
The breeze of transparency blowing into Montreal began in July.
Hundreds of documents have been posted online for the Assembly meeting: by member countries, the Council and the ICAO Secretariat. Some of them contain recommendations that will be debated over two weeks – first by five committees during the initial week and then at the plenary Assembly sessions during the second week.
The documents are available on the ICAO web page: Assembly Working Papers. They can be sorted by the sponsor and in other ways. Most are available in six languages.
The most important proposals come from the ICAO “governing” Council, which meets three times a year, the last time being May 21-June 21, 2019.
No Paper Trail for ICAO Council
Finding out about Council decision-making isn’t made easy.
No draft documents are published before Council meetings, the meetings are closed, and no summary of decisions is issued.
Sometimes a press release emerges about a Council action. For example, in June of 2019, the only press release about the Council meeting was a three-paragraph notice saying the Council “expressed its condemnation” of terrorist bombings reported at Abha International Airport in Saudi Arabia. But normally there is no post-meeting release.
Minutes are taken, but they are not available on the ICAO website.
Nor do Council decision documents, known as “C-Decs,” appear on the ICAO website, although a press officer said, “They can be unrestricted documents.”
Testing this might prove difficult. ICAO has no disclosure policy similar to those of some international organizations and many nations that set of standards for releasing documents and how to request them.
Similar transparency limitations apply to ICAO’s standing committees, such as the Committee on Aviation Environment Protection (CAEP). The meetings of committees and other groups are closed to the public and the media
They can be attended by accredited ICAO “observers” from nongovernmental groups, primarily industry associations.
The documents proposed in advance are posted online with access available only to country representatives and observers. But sharing the documents is forbidden under ICAO rules.
Quiet Origin of a Controversial Council Proposal
The fruits from these secret gardens ripen for Assembly meetings.
Beginning in July, several dozen Council recommendations were posted without fanfare on the ICAO website. They take the form of resolutions for consideration by five committees (called commissions) and the Assembly.
One such Council proposal, dated July 18, has stirred controversy, particularly in Europe and among climate crisis activists.
The key alteration is contained on page 7 of a 9-page Council document (A40-WP/59). It concerns ICAO’s Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA).
The CORSIA policy was adopted at the last session of the ICAO Assembly, in 2016, with the goal of reducing carbon emissions. The multi-faceted, phased program includes a plan to allow airlines to buy carbon offsets to compensate for their CO2 emissions. The details of the ICAO’s carbon offset rules are still being worked out.
The proposed Council amendment would state that the ICAO scheme should be “the only global market-based measure applying to CO2 emissions from international aviation so as to avoid a possible patchwork of duplicative State or regional MBMs…”
This has upset the European Union, which is planning more aggressive regulation of aviation carbon emissions with its Emissions Trading system (ETS). Even though the Council’s restrictive language would not be legally binding on member countries, it is seen as having adverse consequences. The “exclusivity” language was much criticized at a Sept. 4 hearing held by an EU Parliamentary Committee (video). EU countries are expected to oppose it at the Assembly meeting and to voice a formal reservation.”
“The commission’s priority is to preserve its policy space and to comply with the legal obligations under the ETS as well as to secure EU autonomy to legislate,” Director-General for Transport Henrik Holohei told the committee.
Environmentalists are concerned that the proposed ICAO resolution “will give moral weight” to those opposing national efforts to go further than ICAO to control aviation emissions. One such threat is a bill in the US Senate which would made it illegal for US carriers to comply with the EU trading system.
The EU was outvoted on the matter when it came up at the Council meeting in June. It took some time for the news to get out, even to environmentalists who follow aviation climate change matters closely.
The development appears to have flown under the media radar. A detailed article on it ran Sept. 9 in GreenAir, an independent newsletter published in the UK.
Exclusivity Proposal Debate May Not Be on YouTube
The Council’s “exclusivity” resolution will be considered in a largely open process, with one interesting twist.
First, the resolution will be considered by one of five “commissions” that convene at the Assembly meeting. The draft agenda shows they have busy schedules, a grid of meeting times and long dockets. The agenda for the Executive Commission (EC) (here), which handles environmental matters, has 52 items, with CORSIA being item 17.
The EC meeting will be open for press coverage, an ICAO spokesman said, but may not be live-streamed, EYE has learned.
ICAO officials have stressed in general terms that the Assembly plenary sessions and commission meetings will be broadcast live on ICAO’s YouTube channel. On closer inspection this is partially true. If past is prologue, the Executive Commission meetings will not be live cast.
An ICAO spokesman said the organization will broadcast “some” of the commission meetings on YouTube, but he did indicate which ones.
At the previous Assembly meeting in 2016, three out of the five commission meetings were broadcast, according to the ICAO website. The 2106 videos are online here. Not broadcast at the time were the sessions of the Administrative Commission and the Executive Commission.
It appears likely that ICAO will be taking video of all the commission meetings, because “meetings requiring an overflow room are also ‘broadcast’ on to internal screens as necessary,” the spokesman said.
The Assembly plenary sessions will be open for media coverage and live-streamed.
However, because of “logistics requirements” there is no room for the public to attend Assembly meetings, which are held at ICAO headquarters in Montreal.
