The Assembly of the European Conference of Postal and Telecommunications Administrations (CEPT) was held last 19 December in Copenhagen, chaired by Switzerland (Frédéric Rhiel).
This was the first CEPT Assembly meeting held under the tripartite presidency format resulting from the organisation's most recent reform, in effect since March 2009. On that date a decision was made to hold up to one and half years later (period subsequently extended for six more months) a new Assembly to assess the effectiveness of the new tripartite presidency model. To that end, a questionnaire was sent to all the administrations beforehand, inquiring about issues associated to the new leadership and framework. Note that no state indicated a need to change the current model.
The director of the European Communications Office (ECO) reported on the CEPT tripartite presidency’s activities. France disagreed with the decision to not hold regular meetings between the presidency and the most important sector players, namely the European Commission, International Telecommunication Union (ITU) and Universal Postal Union (UPU), and stressed the need to do so at least on an annual basis.
France also warned of the loss of CEPT’s influence, basically in two areas: standardisation and internet. Albania held that it would be useful for specific topics to have a joint group from the three committees forming the presidency: the Electronic Communications Committee (ECC), European Committee for Postal Regulation (CERP) and Committee for ITU Policy (Com-ITU). The Assembly chairman proposed that the three committee chairs should identify common topics.
The Committee chairs reported that they held physical meetings twice during this period and had decided that communications should preferably be conducted by electronic means or informally when at least two of the co-chairs happened to meet at other gatherings. The co-chairs also reported to the plenary session on the respective activities.
The administrations were again made aware of the circumstance that only 31 of the 48 states were contributing toward the ECO’s financing; new adhesions to the Convention were thus urged. Regarding debts to CEPT, they were also informed that contacts continued with Russia, one of the main debtors, with a view to regularising its situation.
According to the new rules of procedure, the CEPT Assembly will in the future only be summoned on an ad hoc basis when duly justified. The Assembly can be summoned by the co-chairs or by a majority comprising 60 percent of the states.
