31 March 2008

Dear SAICM National Focal Points in Asia-Pacific

As I already flagged to you in my message to you on 26 February, the Secretariat calls for a teleconference of regional focal points and NGO/IGO representatives on Monday 7th April to discuss the planning of the Open-Ended Legal and Technical Working Group (OELTWG) and the Second International Conference on Chemical Management (ICCM2). The Secretariat had invited comments from NFPs and other stakeholders on its paper on these issues (reissued in Dec 2007, available from the SAICM website), and recently summarised these comments into two documents. These summaries are already available from the SAICM website as follows, but attached to this e-mail for your convenience.
http://www.chem.unep.ch/saicm/OELTWG/Open-ended.htm
http://www.chem.unep.ch/saicm/iccm/ICCM2/iccm2.htm

These papers mention several specific issues for further consideration. These issues include the agenda for OELTWG and ICCM2, the establishment of the provisional bureau, size of the meetings (arrangements for travel assistance from developing and transition economy countries), language arrangements, etc. As you can see from the secretariat papers, the only submission from AP region came from Yemen. Japan also submitted its late comments, as attached.

Since I will have to represent the region at the telephone conference, I would very much appreciate it if you could provide mw with any initial response you may have about the two secretariat papers. My earlier message on 26 Feb also invited your input, and I heard from Yemen the same message that has been officially submitted.

I will join the teleconference discussion with our basic common understanding described in the report from our regional meeting in May last year (I attach the excerpt from the meeting report), and also taking into account the views of the individual countries expressed in the submissions. However, at the time of the regional meeting, the secretariat's proposals for OELTWG and ICCM2 were not available, so the regional meeting report may not be specific enough to give my full guidance about what I would say at the teleconference. Basically, since there have been very few submissions on the Secretariat's original proposals in December, I presume that the region is supportive of the proposed approach in general. The Secretariat's recent paper calls for the stakeholders' views on some specific issues (e.g. whether or not the agenda of the OELTWG should extended from rules of procedures only, bureau formula for OELTWG and ICCM2, etc) At the forthcoming teleconference, I will try to represent the regional views by extrapolating as much as possible our discussion at the regional meeting in May, and judging from my recent communications with some of you. So your views, no matter whether it is a formal government position or how specific they are to the questions described in secretariat's papers, would be very helpful to me.

Please try to send me your inputs by Friday 4th April. I look forward to hearing from many of you.

Best regards,
Esak

Eisaku Toda
Asia-Pacific Regional Focal Point for SAICM
E-mail:saicm@iges.or.jp