The 2009 session of the Universal Postal Union (UPU) Council of Administration took place last 2-13 November at the organisation's headquarters in Berne and was preceded by meetings of the CA's various working groups and some groups from the Postal Operations Council (POC).
Beyond the report on each committee's activities (including the CA/COP joint committees on Development and Co-operation (C2 CA/POC) and UPU Strategy (C4 CA/POC)) the issues subject to most debate concerned the responsibility of committees C1 (Governance Issues) and C3 (Finances and Administration). The C1 Acts group reviewed and approved (with later insertion of some comments from the International Bureau (IB)) the draft revision of the Acts of the Union articles proposed at the March 2009 meeting. The C1 Reform group (a mixed group with members from the CA and POC) approved the specifications for development of a study on the impact of new postal sector players on the UPU's mission and activities, and a preliminary version of the UPU extra-budget activities guidelines. But it rejected Spain's proposal for delegates to undergo an official accreditation process for UPU council sessions similar to the one for congresses.
C1 also approved two appeals associated to the classification of countries with respect to the application of terminal charges: the first, submitted by Fiji, was based on development indicators corrected for the country to be reclassified from Group 2 to Group 3; the second, approved in a secret voting process, was submitted by the United Arab Emirates to ensure that same remained in the Transition Group (instead of switching to the Target Group), with the argument that much of its population is very poor (mainly migrant workers) and has no purchasing power.
C3 dealt with various IB auditing and management financial reports and looked into the formalisation of two reflection groups previously proposed by the USA and approved in CA'08.3 (one on Human Resources co-ordinated by the USA and the other on Auditing co-ordinated by Canada), in which Portugal will take part, and on a document concerning the creation and removal of some IB positions. Per the understanding that the CA is to approve the creation or removal of core posts within the IB and that the IB director-general can only create or remove non-core positions, the document was submitted to a confused and rather vague voting process which eventually provided grounds for a request to reopen the matter in a plenary meeting. The plenary CA recognised this ambiguity and upon proposal from the USA ended up endorsing the document from the Human Resources reflection group instead of approving it.
The plenary session was also informed of ongoing preparations for the half-cycle Strategy Conference (Nairobi, 22-24 September 2010) and for the 25th UPU Congress (Doha, 25 September to 12 October 2012) and changed the rules for designating the Letter-Writing Contest due to UNESCO's indication that it would no longer be able to regularly take part in the jury.
The CA session also saw organisation of the first Postal Regulation Forum, a comprehensive forum meant to target postal sector decision-makers and regulatory authorities, besides participation by academics and service providers. This first forum was dedicated to the topics of postal market organisation (various regulation models), universal postal service financing and the overall impact of postal market liberalisation at national and international level.
The next CA session will be held between 25 October and 12 November 2010, and be preceded next April by the annual session of the POC (12-30 April 2010), which will include meetings by some groups from the CA, Consultative Committee and Management Committee.
