march 5 part 1

Three countries (Finland, Greece, and Denmark) were scheduled to give updates during the plenary but are now being moved to June due to various reasons. Finland needs more time to assess an independent study, Greece passed legislation quickly in response to recommendations, and Denmark did not provide enough information. The agenda has been adjusted accordingly. The summary record will be postponed for discussion, and a reminder letter will be sent to Denmark. There will also be a group session on Wednesday night. The management group meeting discussed countries mentioned in the monitoring and evaluation report, the work and budget program, global relations strategy, and the designation of the chair. There will be further discussions on these topics throughout the week. The meeting will resume at 10 o'clock with an update on Australia. good winters so far. I am going to start off with the agenda and then talk about a couple of changes to what we had originally expected. First, there are three countries that were due to give updates to the plenary who are no longer giving updates on the plenary. I first need to check if people are online. I need to wait, because there might be people wanting to speak on these matters online. There were three countries who were supposed to be reporting this plenary and, for different reasons, they are being bumped to June. I will give some explanation of that. It is Finland, Greece and Denmark. In the case of Finland, they have reported that they have done a significant amount of work, but amongst the work that they have been doing has involved an independent study and assessment, which is being reported back this month, I believe. We are not quite ready, first of all, to give all details and, secondly, for the lead examiners to be able to assess it properly. It has been proposed that that is moved back to June. Finland is in the room. Do you want to elaborate? Are you happy with that? That is Finland. In the case of Greece, do we have Greece in the room right now? Greece was given a summary of the reports and findings in early February, I believe, and subsequently announced that they tabled a new piece of legislation in their legislature to satisfy a number of the key recommendations. That meant that this is almost like a last-minute change. I understand that the legislation was subsequently passed within about two weeks, which is probably the fastest I have ever heard of legislation being passed, certainly as a result of the WGB's work. I think that the group can take great satisfaction that our evaluation follow-up and the summary findings prompted such action so quickly. That is a tremendous achievement, but what that means is that the lead examiners have not had a chance to assess the law and to give any conclusions. We are doing something a little bit different with Greece. For all the recommendations that are not covered by the legislation, the lead examiners have received and reviewed the information provided by Greece. They will not be discussed today. They will be discussed in June, but the updates are frozen, so Greece will not be able to give any more information on those recommendations. That is so that we can ensure equal treatment. This is not an opportunity for them to have more time to report back on, but we will discuss them in June. For those recommendations that are subject to the legislation, they will be open for further discussion and information sharing between Greece and the lead examiners for a full review in June. I hope that that makes sense. Greece, do you want to elaborate on any of that, or are you happy with the summary? Yes. Okay, thank you. That is good news, it looks like. Hopefully, the lead examiners will report favourably back on the new legislation, but two weeks to pass the law is remarkable. Less good news is Denmark, who were due to report back here. I am sorry to say that they did not give a great deal of information as to why they had not been able to report back. There were a number of logistical issues at their end. They did come in with some information, but it would have been too late for the lead examiners and the secretary-general to process fully. That is going to be moved to June, but that really is not an acceptable approach to the evaluation follow-ups. I do not think that Denmark is in the room right now or online, so forgive me if they are online and want to raise their hand. The suggestion is that we will move them back to June, because there is no other practical solution, but June is a really heavy plenary. There is going to be a lot of things to discuss and a lot of them will take up a lot of time. One of the subjects of this week's agenda—and, quite frankly, it has been for a while now—is budget. If we do not report when we are supposed to report, that just increases the budgetary strain and is not really acceptable. The suggestion is that we will allow them to push back to June, but I will, as the chair, send them a letter to remind them of their obligations to provide timely updates and to progress the work on their recommendations in a timely fashion. I urge countries not to see this as a precedent that countries that are not sufficiently organised can expect it to be pushed through. We will arrange a letter from the chair to Denmark as a follow-up. That is for three countries. Does anybody want to make any quick comments on those? Two other changes to the agenda are worth mentioning. We noted that, for logistical reasons, the summary record was not available for posting until fairly late last night. We will not be discussing that this morning. We wanted to give you a chance to have a read of them and come up with any comments. We will push that back. If you can try to have that prepared by Thursday—it is most likely that I will do it on Friday, but if we have any space on Thursday, I might bring it forward. It will be available on 1, so if you can have a look at that, that would be great. The final thing that is not on the agenda—you know that I am going to mention it—is Wednesday night, 6 o'clock, happy hour, cappie arrow. I will give you more information later, but I have booked a space for Wednesday night for a group session. Those are the updates on the agenda. Are there any comments on the agenda as it stands with those amendments? Great. I am going to move on from item 2 and go straight to item 3, which is on the management group meeting. We had a management group meeting yesterday. The idea of this update is not really to repeat what you are going to hear later in the week. For a lot of the discussions, we are just framing the way that the agenda is going to work and the way that the conversations are going to flow this week. We started off by covering a number of countries that were going to be mentioned in the monitoring and evaluation report, just to get a sense of some of the topics that may be discussed in those reports. We discussed Luxembourg, we discussed Germany, we discussed France, we discussed the Slovak Republic, we discussed Peru and all other topics of conversation will come up during the plenary this week. We also had a discussion about the programme on work and budget. This is going to be one of the biggest ticket items that we have to discuss this week. It is complicated. If you have not read the paper yet, I would really urge you to do so by Thursday when we have that tomorrow. We are going to need happy hour after discussing the budget, I think. If you could make sure that you have read that in detail. We discussed how the discussion will flow and we will be getting a presentation from the secretary of state on the various outputs, so we can discuss some of the packages of work and then we will hopefully have a clear idea of which decisions we need to be made when on the budgetary process, but it is complicated. We also discussed the global relations strategy and how that is going to work on Thursday, noting that we had a mission to Riyadh a couple of weeks ago and our friends in Saudi Arabia are here and will be presenting the update as we have to make a decision on that participant status. That is on Thursday. One other thing that we discussed is the designation of the chair. You should have seen all the applications from—I think that we had 11 candidates. There is going to be a fuller discussion on that later in the week, but we are going to agree on a short list this week, which the Atoch search group has given its recommendations to the group as a short list, but this room will decide what the short list will be and then we will also have a discussion about what kind of questions we might want to ask them, because those questions will be circulated to the candidates in advance as per the usual procedures. That is a report on the management group. Are there any questions or comments? Great. We are running a little early, because we are going to be talking about the toilet topper at 10 o'clock. Do we have Australia online at the moment? I have got an update on Australia, but they need to be online first. I do not see them, so I will not be able to do that. I think we are going to have to reorganise the room. This is going to be a closed session. We are going to be starting at 10, because we need the right people in the room. I am going to give you 15 minutes back to mingle and I cannot even suggest you go for coffee, because the cafe shuts. We will see you back here in 15 minutes. Thanks.