1. About the ILO
2. Topics
3. Regions
4. Meetings and events
5. Publications
6. Research
7. Labour standards
8. Statistics and databases

SECOND ITEM ON THE AGENDA

Possible amendments to articles 5 and 26 of the Conference Standing Orders particularly with respect to the non-payment of delegates' expenses

1. At the Governing Body's 265th Session in March, the Office submitted a paper on a recommendation by a credentials committee of the International Labour Conference that consideration be given to amending or clarifying the Conference's Standing Orders so as to set out the role and functions of the Credentials Committee with respect to non-compliance with the constitutional obligation on governments to pay the travel and subsistence expenses of their delegates and advisers.⁽¹⁾ On the recommendation of the Committee on Legal Issues and International Labour Standards, the Governing Body requested the Office to prepare a more complete paper which would, in the light of the Committee's discussions,⁽²⁾ propose the text of a possible amendment to the Conference Standing Orders covering the consideration by the Credentials Committee of complaints of non-compliance with the constitutional provision concerned, namely article 13, paragraph 2(a). The present paper has been prepared in response to that request.

2. The Employer and Worker members who took part in the Committee's discussions in March were in full agreement with the general recommendations that had been made, and most Government representatives agreed that the Credentials Committee should monitor the situation with respect to the payment of delegations' travel and subsistence expenses and consider complaints of non-payment. However, at the same time, Government representatives felt that great caution should be exercised and that a delicate balance should be considered in formulating the amendment of the Standing Orders concerned.

3. The ingredients to be put into the balance, as they emerge from the discussions, appear to be the following:

• the proposed amendment should not be a disincentive to the appointment of advisers; in this connection, governments pointed out that while the obligation to cover expenses extended to advisers, there was no obligation on them to appoint any advisers; and Worker members indicated that, without the appointment of advisers, delegations could not effectively participate in the Conference;
• the primary objective should therefore be to ensure that, at the very least and as a matter of priority before making any other appointments, Members appoint and make provision for covering the expenses (for the whole period of the Conference) of the four delegates specified in article 3, paragraph 1, of the Constitution; at the same time, the amendment should avoid transforming this minimum composition into a norm;
• another important objective, stressed by the Employer and Worker members, should be to discourage unequal treatment, as between the three groups, in the numbers of advisers appointed, but (as pointed out by a Government representative) a complaints procedure should not be a "back door" to alleging that a government had appointed an insufficient number of advisers;
• due account should be taken of the financial constraints on certain governments with respect to covering the expenses of advisers and to the factor of trade union pluralism, which may often be related in the sense that it may lead countries to appointing a larger delegation than they can afford;
• the proposed amendment should not unduly increase the workload of the Credentials Committee, whose procedures should ensure that governments which were the subject of allegations of not paying expenses had a proper opportunity to reply.

4. The possible amendments set out below seek to take all the above points into account. They are based on a cautious approach, which is at the same time designed to provide a mechanism that is as effective as the Constitution at present allows. The caution is best reflected in the suggested requirement for consensus among the three members of the Credentials Committee. In this connection, it should be noted that there has been full agreement in the various credentials committees on all cases that they have dealt with concerning alleged non-payment of expenses.

5. On the subject of effectiveness it may be recalled that, during the Committee's last discussion, the Worker members touched on the question of the legal consequences if a complaint under the proposed amendment were considered to be well-founded, by asking whether this could lead to the application of article 4 of the Constitution: under paragraph 2 of that provision, if a Member fails to nominate one of the non-Government delegates the other is not permitted to vote; the latter's right to vote is also lost if the other non-Government delegate is refused admission because of invalid credentials as, according to paragraph 3, paragraph 2 will apply in this situation "as if that delegate had not been nominated". There is, however, no similar provision for the case where a delegate is nominated but cannot attend because of failure to pay travel and subsistence expenses. Such a provision could not therefore be introduced into the Standing Orders at the present time, as it would require an amendment of the Constitution.

6. The basic mandate of the Credentials Committee is set out in paragraph 2 of article 5 of the Conference Standing Orders and the detailed procedures are contained in Section B of Part II, consisting of article 26. In the light of the Committee's discussions, the following underlined sentence could be added at the end of article 5, paragraph 2:

• The Credentials Committee shall examine the credentials of delegates and their advisers, and any objection relating thereto, in accordance with the provisions of Section B of Part II. Within the limits laid down in the said Section B, the Committee may also consider any complaints of non-observance of paragraph 2(a) of article 13 of the Constitution.

7. The following paragraphs could be considered for inclusion at the end of article 26:

• 9. The Credentials Committee may consider complaints that a Member has failed to comply with paragraph 2(a) of article 13 of the Constitution, where:
  1. the Member is alleged to have refused to pay the travelling and subsistence expenses of one or more of the delegates that it has nominated in accordance with article 3, paragraph 1, of the Constitution, or
  2. the complaint alleges an imbalance, which the Committee unanimously considers to be a serious one, as between the number of Employers' or Workers' advisers whose expenses have been covered in the delegation concerned and the number of advisers appointed for the Government delegates.

  10. A complaint referred to in paragraph 9 shall not be receivable in the following cases:

  1. if the complaint is not lodged with the Secretary-General of the Conference before 10 a.m. on the seventh day following the opening of the Conference and the Committee considers that there is insufficient time to deal with it properly;
  2. if the complaint is not lodged by an accredited delegate or adviser alleging non-payment of the expenses or by an organization or person acting on his or her behalf.

  11. The Credentials Committee shall, in its report, present to the Conference any conclusions that it has unanimously reached on each complaint considered by it.

8. If there is agreement that amendments on the above lines should be proposed to the Conference, a further question arises as to when the new provisions, if adopted, could enter into force. The Credentials Committee at the 83rd Session of the Conference in June this year expressed the hope that an appropriate solution would be found and put into effect at the Conference's 1997 Session.⁽³⁾ However, any amendment proposed by the Governing Body, which would probably be referred by the Conference to a standing orders committee, could not be ready for adoption until the last week of the session, at which point it would be too late to submit a complaint. Nevertheless, the Conference's decision on the amendments could well influence the Credentials Committee's handling of communications relating to the non-payment of expenses that are likely to be submitted to it in any event, during the 1997 Conference, having regard to past practice.

9. If proposals are made for the above amendment, the opportunity could be taken by the Governing Body also to suggest an amendment on an unrelated aspect of article 26 of the Standing Orders, namely the time-limit for lodging objections, which no longer accords with actual reality and causes problems due to the shortening of the Conference period. If the Committee on Legal Issues and International Labour Standards agrees, a possible amendment could be submitted to it by the Office in March 1997.

10. The Committee may therefore wish to recommend to the Governing Body that it propose to the 85th Session (June 1997) of the International Labour Conference the amendments set out in paragraphs 6 and 7 above, as modified during the Committee's discussions.

Geneva, 1 October 1996.

Point for decision: Paragraph 10.

¹ GB.265/LILS/1.

² GB.265/8/1, paras. 2 to 10.

³ Provisional Record, No. 5D, para. 18.