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The CD adopts a schedule of informal meetings

Beatrice Fihn | Reaching Critical Will of WILPF

The Conference on Disarmament (CD) met on 7 June to discuss and adopt a working paper outlining the organization of informal debates as was discussed in the plenary last week. Ambassador Van Meeuwen, President of the CD, as well as the Group of 21, China, Algeria, Egypt, Pakistan, the United States, Brazil, the Secretary-General of the CD, Iran, and Italy delivered statements.

Brief highlights

- After the confusion last week, the CD today adopted working paper CD/WP.560, which contains the organization of informal meetings to be held on the agenda items. The paper includes a schedule for the meetings, with four meetings per agenda item, as well as the names the coordinators.

- Sweden and Algeria will coordinate four meetings each under agenda item 1 and 2, Brazil will coordinate the discussions on agenda item 3, Bangladesh will coordinate agenda item 4, Belarus will coordinate agenda item 5, Indonesia will deal with agenda item 6, and Finland will coordinate the informal meetings under agenda item 7.

WP.560
The President had circulated the draft schedule as an informal paper on Friday, 4 June, in order to accommodate the requests from some delegations expressed last week. However, the Group of 21 requested the informal paper to be submitted as an official draft proposal to the CD and argued that it should include the names of the coordinators. China supported the views of G21 and argued that the rules of procedure must be respected and without rules, the Conference would fall into chaos. The Ambassador of Pakistan argued that since the President had appointed the coordinators, they should have no role and no official status, and that the reports of the coordinators should have no status.

Ambassador Van Meeuwen of Belgium turned his letter from last Friday into a working paper and distributed to the CD. He explained that he had held further consultations since this morning on the working paper and each regional group had also held meetings to discuss the working paper and all had agreed on the coordinators for each item. The working paper was adopted at the close of the plenary.

The informal meetings on agenda item 1 and 2 started immediately in the afternoon and will continue throughout this week. The next plenary meeting is scheduled for Friday, 11 June.