Suggested process for making comments to the revised constitutional documents recently published

[Published on IAML-L, 24 April]

"Dear colleagues

Now that the proposed revisions for both the Constitution and Rules of Procedure have been published on the IAML website [Secretary General's note: Please, see the attachments below], I thought it might be useful for me, as Chair of the group which Council requested be set up ‘to draft changes in the Constitution and the Rules of Procedure to create an administrative structure for IAML with the decision-making authority divided between the Board and the General Assembly’ (Council minutes, Vienna, 28 July, 1 August 2013), to send a note round to advise on the process from now.

The drafting group met the requirement of the present Constitution that any proposed changes reach the Secretary General not less than six months before the General Assembly at which these changes will be voted on. Now those documents have been made available to members three months before the General Assembly – as also stipulated by the Constitution. As Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie reminded us in her email of 11 April, it is not possible to propose or make any changes to the texts once they have been submitted to the Secretary General. It is on the texts of the documents as they now stand that we will vote in Antwerp.

I hope you will have seen that we have provided translations of the documents into French and German, and an explanatory document, also translated, which will help explain the rationale behind the changes we are proposing. Barbara did recognise that of course colleagues will wish to discuss these proposals, and indeed that would be most welcome. I would suggest that the best way of doing this is by writing an email to IAML-L with the subject line ‘Constitution and Rules of Procedure’ to help everyone identify these responses. If colleagues wish to offer comments on a number of issues, it would be helpful if in the course of their comments they made precise references to the articles (Constitution) or rules (Rules of Procedure) to which they are referring. Any subsequent replies to any of these points would be best made in new, original, emails, rather than by replying to the previous email in a continuous chain. This seems to me the best way of keeping the dialogue and chronology of comments simple on IAML-L and in everyone’s inboxes.

I will try to reply quickly myself to all emails sent to the list on these matters, but if I am unable to do so because of the pressure of other business, will arrange for a reply to be sent which represents the views of the drafting group.

I hope these suggestions are helpful.

Best wishes
Richard Chesser"