The first meeting this year of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) Council of Administration (CA) was held last 22-25 April at UPU headquarters in Berne, Switzerland. It was also the first meeting since the Congress held from 24 September to 15 October 2012 in Doha, Qatar. Portugal was elected to the CA at that Congress and once again took part as an effective member, after a four year period as an observer; it was represented by ANACOM.
This was an extraordinary meeting, given that the CA's regular session is held in October, and was basically organisational and meant to launch the work of the CA and its subsidiary bodies. The working programmes of the committees and their project teams were therefore approved and the respective chairs and vice-chairs appointed as needed. Ad hoc groups were also set up in the scope of the project teams, to carry out work on a number of specific issues requiring narrower initial involvement by experts to produce the preliminary reports and documents to be further developed by the permanent bodies.
The CA still had to deal with two intensely debated issues whose conclusion was not peaceful:
- Approval of the current year's budget. The proposal submitted by the director general was hotly contested by some countries (mainly the biggest contributors). It considered raising the contribution unit compared to previous years, even though the overall total showed no increase, as decided by the Congress, given that some countries' contribution category was lowered. The CA adopted a revised version of the budget following a proposal by Japan, which maintains the contribution unit value from previous years and asks the director general to try to compensate for the missing amount by savings, activity cutbacks or alternative financing sources;
- The matter associated to the '.post' top-level domain name registered by the UPU at the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and to the process of opening new top-level domains launched by that body. The UPU's International Bureau (IB) considered that it should contest two registries notified to ICANN per that process: '.epost', submitted by the German postal operator (that country's designated operator at the UPU), given that it might be confused with '.post'; and '.mail', notified by various bodies, given that it might harm interests of the postal sector in general and the UPU-designated operators. The first case was particularly discussed, given that some countries held that limiting the launch of new products and solutions because they allegedly harmed the interests of the '.post' project and designated operators involved in same would hurt competition in the sector. It was considered that a policy should be worked out to deal with future situations (which may have a high probability of occurrence), whereby the IB should prepare updated and complementary information to present at the CA's regular session, to ensure more informed and hopefully conclusive debate on this subject.
Besides the plenary session, the various CA committees met for the first time under the current structure, as did two of the respective project teams: on Acts of the Union and on Reform of the Union. The Postal Operations Council (POC) and subsidiary bodies also met on 18-19 April, although ANACOM did not participate.
