SPS International Agreements - Detailed

The styles and decisional processes of the ITU and the UN are different. As a specialized agency of the UN the ITU has for many years developed procedures and processes to deal with radio frequencies. The ITU uses a Plenipotentiary Conference scheduled to meet at regular intervals and normally every five years. It conducts periodic administrative conferences to issue specific regulations. It has an administrative council of 36 members and an experienced general secretariat. Its IFRB and the International Radio Consultative Committee (CCIR) are staffed by experts. The ITU's decisional process is manned by technicians representing member States who work with the specialists of the ITU. Presumably the national technicians interrelate with politically oriented decision makers in their home States before they engage the procedures and processes of the ITU. The impression exists that the ITU in the totality of its operations is weighted more in the direction of technical feasibility than in the direction of a balancing of competing political interests. The ITU, although certainly not immune from the pressures of competing ideologies and the differing interests of the new and the old States, is separated from the great concerns for the maintenance of international peace and security that reside in the UN. Outer space decisions at the UN are focused in COPUOS. It has two subcommittees, namely, legal and scientific and technical. Each establishes working groups to assist in the preparation of draft For an assessment of ways to strengthen the ITU see "The Future of Satellite Communications, Resource Management and the Needs of Nations, Second Report of the Twentieth Century Fund Task Force on International Satellite Communications," pp. 21-27 (1970).

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