By Toby McIntosh
Two United Nations agencies have taken significant steps into the new world of virtual meetings — the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO).
The ICAO, based in Montreal, held the first online decision-making meeting of its governing Council.
For the IMO, headquartered in London, all members were invited for an online session to discuss priorities for holding virtual meetings.
The developments come as many UN agencies are moving to hold virtual meetings, facing both procedural and technical issues. (See April 20 EYE survey report.)
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IMO Discussing Priorities for Virtual Meetings; No Dates Set
At the IMO virtual session April 23, open to all members but nonpublic, officials described “a priority list” for which upcoming meetings should be held online.
“The proposal give priority to a regular session of the IMO Council, followed by meetings of the Marine Environment Protection Committee (MEPC) – which will be preceded by the 7th meeting of the Intersessional Working Group on Reduction of GHG Emissions from Ships – and to the Maritime Safety Committee (MSC),” according to an IMO press release.
The choices highlight IMO’s continued commitment to moving forward with combatting climate change, IMO Secretary-General Kitack Lim said, according to the press release.
No dates were set for the committee meetings, however. The IMO postponed a March meeting of the Marine Environment Protection Committee.
Such decisions may come at the next session of the Council (C ES 32), which will start on May 4. “It will be held by correspondence over two months, to allow time for Member States (Council Members and observers) to communicate on various agenda items, including holding meetings in future,” the IMO said.
Also at the virtual briefing, the participants were told about “work being done by the Secretariat, in liaison with other UN agencies and bodies, to explore the practicalities of holding virtual meetings, including multilingual meetings with interpretation into the six official languages of the Organization.” The press release gave no further details, but arranging virtual simultaneous translation remains an issue at the IMO and other UN agencies.
The session was attended by permanent representatives and liaison officers from 78 IMO member states and one associate member, according to the press release. A total of 155 participants attended, making it the largest virtual meeting organized by IMO to date.
ICAO Holds Virtual Formal Council Meeting
A mention of the first ICAO virtual meeting at which decisions were made was tweeted out by the French representative to ICAO, Phillippe Bertoux, along with a screen shot showing 25 faces of the 123 online at that moment on April 28.
The virtual meetings will continue.
“It is currently foreseen that all meetings will be conducted virtually until decided otherwise,” an ICAO spokesperson said.
Holding meetings virtually has not impacted Council procedures. Votes are taken by a show of hands, “unless it decides otherwise, in which case the Secretariat will provide facilities for states to vote,” the ICAO representative said, noting, “This has not happened as of yet.”
However, there not be simultaneous translation. “Currently the Secretariat is providing Zoom facilities for this purpose, for which we have not yet been able to identify a simultaneous interpretation solution,” the spokesperson said.
Although ICAO doesn’t issue an agenda for Council meetings, Bertoux tweeted, “On today’s agenda ? COVID-19, of course …”
Meetings of the 36-member Council are nonpublic and no pre-meeting or post-meeting documents are disclosed. (There was no official public announcement of the session.) Accredited observers can watch Council sessions, but not participate, a procedure that remains in place, the spokesperson said. The Council posts annual reports on ICAO’s website, but not minutes of the meetings.
The April 28 session was the first virtual decision-making session for the Council. However, several weeks ago, the Council on April 9 held its first virtual meeting, an “informal briefing,” on the impact of Covid-19 on the aviation sector.
The Council is slated to hold its “committee phase” from May 4-22, during which time five committees develop policy recommendations. The “Council phase” is scheduled for June 8-26.
The ICAO Assembly is October adopted a resolution directing the ICAO Council and the Secretary General to “take further concrete steps to increase transparency.” (See EYE report.)
ICAO can do live broadcasts of its meetings, but has been selective in doing so. In September of 2019 ICAO decided not to webcast committee discussions about climate change during its triennial Assembly meeting in Montreal. Although three of the five ICAO committees were ”livecast” on the ICAO YouTube channel, two were not: the Administrative Commission and the Executive Commission, which has the environment mandate. (See EYE article.)
