The Congress of the Universal Postal Union (UPU), which took place between 23 July and 12 August 2008 in Geneva, brought together 2,500 plenipotentiaries from 179 of the UPU's 191 Member Countries.
600 proposals were analysed at the Congress, resulting from work carried out over the last four years, including the following key decisions:
- The approval of the new world postal strategy, the Nairobi Postal Strategy, which sets out the way forward for the Union over the four years from January 2009. This strategy contains four objectives, stressing the importance of the postal sector in the economic and social development of the Union's Member States.
- The new agreement on payment services, applicable to the signatory countries of the agreement and which updates the previous version adopted in the Congress of Bucharest;
- The review of the system of termination dues and the classification of countries and territories for the purposes of this system's application during the period 2010-2013. The termination dues comprise the remuneration which the destination postal administration has the right to receive from the sender postal administration as compensation for the expenses incurred as a result of the handling of the correspondence items received. As such, the review of this system is enormously relevant to postal administrations in view of the financial impact of its application. The system of termination dues has two sub-systems: a target system, which will apply to the exchanges between the current and new countries of the target system (countries which are more developed in postal terms), and a transition system, applicable to exchanges with and between countries of the transition system, which is intended for countries with a lower level of postal development;
- Amendments to the Acts, especially with respect to the replacement of the term ''postal administration'' with the terms ''member country'' and ''designated operator'' (or combination of the two), in order to adapt the documents of the UPU to the current reality of the postal sector, particular the growing separation of the functions and powers between operator and regulator/government;
- The advance of the reform of the UPU, particularly with respect to the clarification and separation of functions between the Council of Administration (CA) and the Postal Operations Council (POC);
- The cooperation policy for the development of the UPU for the period 2009-2012;
- The approval of the financial plan for the next four years, with the abandonment, after over ten years, of the zero nominal growth policy, even while the growth permitted for the budget cap remains largely insignificant.
Regarding the electoral processes which took place during this Congress, Edouard Dayan and Guozhong Huang, the only candidates for the posts of Director General and Deputy Director General respectively, were re-elected by acclamation.
Portugal was re-elected to the POC, while it failed to achieve re-election to the CA.
Finally, Qatar, the only candidate host country for the XXV Congress of the UPU, was elected by acclamation and will host the event in 2012 in Doha.
