1. While it is true that the Statute of the Assembly has the binding force of a constitutional law which cannot be modified by the Assembly, the latter is none the less entirely free to determine in its own Rules of Procedure the conditions of its application. Moreover, Article 28 of the Statute clearly states that " the Consultative Assembly shall adopt its Rules of Procedure. "
In accordance with this principle the Assembly adopted at the beginning of its first Session a set of provisional Rules of Procedure prepared by the Preparatory Committee of the Council of Europe with the assistance of a Committee of parliamentary experts. The Assembly soon eliminated certain of its provisions, either as a result of a formal decision, or by allowing a usage to become established which was at variance with the letter of these Rules. Accordingly, at the second Session fresh Rules of Procedure were adopted, which, while maintaining the outward form of the originals, varied considerably therefrom in detail (see Second Session : Doc. 2, Report of the Committee on Rules of Procedure).
The working methods of a young and novel type of Assembly evolve rapidly, however, and it must be admitted that, in certain cases, this evolution has not always been calculated to promote the orderly conduct of business. The problems of systematizing these methods have thus become particularly urgent, and is to some extent fraught with consequences for the future of the Assembly. It was to meet such problem that the Assembly decided upon this revision of the Rules of Procedure.
2. In certain respects the Assembly is a parliamentary body, but differs from national Assemblies in that no majority group determined to carry through a political programme in face of the opposition of one or more minorities has so far made its appearance. One result of this first characteristic is that the Rules of Procedure of the Assembly, in contradistinction to those of national Parliaments, are not essentially designed to maintain a certain equilibrium and promote political tolerance so that the rights of the minority will be safeguarded against the excessive power of the majority, and the majority be protected against systematic obstruction on the part of the minority. They are more in the nature of an instrument for maintaining order and discipline, whether applied to Representatives as individuals, or to organs of the Assembly, as for example its Committees.
3. Viewed from another angle, the Assembly remains though only relatively speaking, it must be admitted, a diplomatic organ, more especially as regards its Agenda. A Parliament which is almost always in session, often dealing with topical problems, can fix the essential items on its Agenda from month to month or from week to week. The Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, sitting for one month in the year—which period, moreover, is now divided into two or more parts—must give very careful consideration to deciding in advance the Agenda for each part of the session, just as a diplomatic conference would have to do. Such a requirement has not always been remembered; it cannot be evaded in the new Rules of Procedure.
4. In spite of these various characteristics peculiar to itself, the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe, nevertheless, remains an Assembly within which debates are governed by Rules of Procedure which nave very many points in common with those of all other Assemblies. The Consultative Assembly has shown a fine eclectic spirit in endeavouring to adopt from this or that national Parliament points which seemed best suited to its work.
5. The Assembly's field of action is not confined to questions submitted to it by the Committee of Ministers for an opinion, but extends to questions raised within its own precincts in application of a right similar to the right to initiate legislation recognised in ordinary parliamentary Assemblies. The only distinction, therefore, which the Rules of Procedure need make in this respect is between texts which must statutorily be transmitted to the Committee of Ministers, namely Recommendations and opinions which must be adopted by a two-thirds majority, and other texts such as Resolutions and Orders of the Assembly, which may be adopted by the Assembly by a simple majority.
6. In the light of these considerations, and in accordance with the terms of reference laid down for it by the Assembly, your Committee has endeavoured to bring the whole of the Rules of Procedure into line with present requirements, taking into account :
The result has been that substantial changes were made in the provisions concerning Committees (see Para. 2 above), in the settlement of the Agenda (see Para. 3), and the ordering of debates (see Para. 4). The revision of the other articles was undertaken either to bring them into harmony with the recent amendments to the Statute of the Council, or to obtain a greater degree of precision which experience had shown to be necessary, or lastly to improve the detail of a procedure hitherto followed.
The method adopted by the Committee consisted in the examination of the present Rules of Procedure article by article.
7. Examination of credentials and duration of term of office.
The modification of certain details in Rules 1 to 5 is the result of custom or of recent amendments to the Statute.
The modifications in Rules 6 and 7, however, relative to the examination or credentials and the duration of term of office, raise serious questions of principle.
There are two ways of looking at these rules. In the first place, examination of credentials may be considered as referring solely to the instrument that bears witness to the powers conferred on one of its own nationals by a Member State as its Representative, thus reducing the examination to a simple verification of credentials in accordance with the practice in diplomatic conferences. In the second place, the examination may be considered as an enquiry into the regularity of the national procedures of nomination, and the conformity of such nomination with the statutory rules and fundamental principles set forth in the Preamble to the Statute.
Examination of Credentials may therefore be considered as a parliamentary procedure (enquiry into possible electoral abuses) or as an ordinary diplomatic practice (verification of plenipotentiary credentials).
Nevertheless, the legal nature of the powers conferred on the Representative to the Assembly excludes the possibility of an analogy with either parliamentary or diplomatic procedure. The office of Representative to the Assembly is the result of a double investiture ; first of all, national investiture, which finds its concrete expression in the granting of documents attesting the powers granted by Parliament or Government to have the Member Country in question represented in the Assembly; secondly there is the European investiture, namely the admission to the Assembly, which finds its concrete expression in the adoption by the Assembly of the Report presented by the Credentials Committee.
This double investiture is essential to ensure the validity and duration of the term of office of the Representative. Two difficulties then arise.
The first case to be considered is when a Representative ceases to be entitled to national investiture, in. particular as the result of general or by-elections in a given country.
If such events take place during the interval between ordinary Sessions, or in the period of interruption of an ordinary Session, the Representative loses his national investiture; consequently, his European investiture does not suffice to enable him to sit on a Committee of the Assembly until the opening or the resumption of the session.
This conclusion not only follows from an application of legal reasoning but represents also a political and practical necessity, the importance of which is plain to see.
It is, indeed, essential that Representatives who are to sit on Committees should satisfy two conditions. They should reflect the atmosphere and views of their respective Parliaments and they should have the right to appear before the Assembly to defend such ideas as they may have advocated in Committee. This would avoid a situation in which work done in Committee and sponsored by a Representative who, having failed to obtain re-election, continued nevertheless to be a member of the Committee, would come to be presented to an Assembly in which the Representative in question has been replaced by another with different or even widely divergent views and principles.
The second case is where there has been a national investiture between two Sessions or part-Sessions and therefore not yet confirmed by a European investiture, since the new credentials cannot be verified before the opening or resumption of the Session. This Representative, although vested in office by his country, will be debarred from taking his seat, in the absence of a European investiture.
Your Committee advocates the following solution. Under paragraph 4 of Rule 6 a Representative whose credentials are challenged may take his seat provisionally with the same rights as other Representatives. Could not this Rule be extended to include a Representative whose credentials have not yet been verified? What difference is there between the position of a Representative who has come before the Credentials Committee without obtaining the definite approval of the latter, and that of a Representative who has been unable to come before the Committee and who has so far been unable to have the regularity of his internal investiture examined or obtain European investiture? It may reasonably be held that there are no legal objections to treating unexamined credentials as equivalent to challenged credentials.
As for the practical difficulties, there are two possible solutions. One is to request the Governments or Parliaments to indicate by name which Representatives replace which ex-Representatives, in the case of changes in the lists of their country. The other is to request all the Representatives of a given country to arrange between themselves the allocation of vacant seats on Committees, and to indicate by name the replacements made. In this way the newly-elected Members of Parliament, whose credentials had not yet been examined, could sit provisionally in Committee before the examination of credentials.
Whatever the solution adopted by national delegations, the draft Rules of Procedure simply point out in Rule 7, paragraph 2 that the Bureau must give its assent to provisional appointments which have been arranged in this way.
A third distinctive situation may arise in which the national investiture of a Representative may come to an end (as a result, for example, of electoral defeat), and in which a meeting of a Committee may fall due before new nominations have been made by the national Parliament concerned. The question then arises as to whether the former Representatives who have not been replaced may or may not sit in Committee. Reasons of a legal nature would naturally tend to indicate a negative reply to this question, in view of the fact that the absence of national investiture precludes the possibility of European investiture. Practical reasons, however, such as the need for a quorum, require that those Representatives who have not been replaced, but whose credentials have expired, should take their seats provisionally in Committees, since it is unlikely that national law will ever stand in the way.
Such are the arrangements which your Committee considers necessary and which are dealt with in the provisions of the new Rule 7.
8. Preparation of the Agenda for Sessions.
In Rules 8 to 13, inclusive, only slight changes have been made. It should, however, be pointed out that your Committee proposes that henceforth and in the case of the first two ballots the President and the Vice-Presidents should be elected by an absolute majority of votes cast; the question does not arise for the third ballot. Furthermore the President should occupy the Chair immediately on his election, and not as hitherto after the election of the Bureau has been completed.
Rules 14, 15 and 16 under Part IV regarding the Agenda of Sessions, have been to a great extent re-cast in order to take account, on the one hand, of amendments to the Statute which give the Assembly full powers over its own Agenda, and, on the other, of the need to determine clearly the present practice by defining the role of the Bureau and of the Standing Committee in this field. Your Committee endeavoured to clarify the procedure without making changes. The gist of the proposed text is as follows :
9. Time-table and Orders of the Day of Sittings of the Assembly.
Rules 17 to 23 inclusive call for no particular comment. Only slight changes have been made in wording either by the addition of further particulars which time has shown to be necessary or simply because of the confirmation by the Committee of previous decisions of an administrative nature, for example, as regards the preparation of the Official Report of debates.
Your Committee considers that it would be no infringement of the principle laid down in Rule 17, if technical provisions were made for the use of other languages enabling the Representatives to take part in a more efficient way in the work of the Consultative Assembly.
The new Rule 24 dealing with the Time-table and the Orders of the Day for Sittings repeats the substance of Rule 16 and 23 of the present Rules. Furthermore, it lays down that Sittings should at the latest be normally opened at 10 a.m. and 3 p.m. and closed at 1 p.m. and 6.30 p.m. respectively. In this, your Committee retained the system in use in Great Britain, adapting it to the particular needs of the Assembly (cf. Standing Orders of the House of Commons No. 1, Sittings of the House, and No. 2, Friday Sittings). It is also laid down in paragraph 1 that Sittings shall begin not later than five minutes after the appointed time. Your Committee would point out that, if the President is unavoidably detained and unable to be present by such a time, his place may be taken, under the provisions of Rule 11 (paragraph 1), by one of the Vice-Presidents. Finally, para. 3 of Rule 24 lays down that the Orders of the Day of Sittings should be settled in accordance with the order of priority shown on the Agenda of the Session; this would give a real meaning to that priority.
10. Order of Debates.
Rules 25 and 26 have not been changed except for their numbering.
As regards Rules 27 to 30, however, important additions have been inserted to clarify instructions for the Order of Debates. The practice followed so far has shown that the best method, and one that is accepted as readily by the supporters of Anglo-Saxon procedure as by that of Continental or Scandinavian procedures, is as follows :
The examination of texts, and in particular the method of debating amendments, has been in the new Rule 29 the subject of detailed provisions, the necessity of which became apparent owing to the differing procedures of the various national Parliaments and the resulting confusion produced in certain debates of the Assembly. First, there has been inserted in the Rules the principle, previously adopted by the Assembly, that amendments should refer exclusively to the enacting terms of the Report, and that they should be put to the vote before the enacting terms are voted on. Secondly, the new Rules lay down that, where several amendments apply to the same passage in Reports and are mutually exclusive, they shall be put to the vote in turn, beginning with the amendment which differs most radically from the basic text; the adoption of an amendment thus involves the ipso facto rejection of all subsequent such amendments. This method of debating amendments, which enables Representatives to fall back successively to less and less advanced positions, differs from the method employed in this contingency in the British Parliament, where mutually exclusive amendments to the same passage in the text.are considered in the order in which they have been handed in ; with the important reservation, however, that the Speaker has the right to exclude those amendments which he does not propose to have debated, so that ultimately this right of selection constitutes a practical safeguard against the arbitrary nature of an order based on purely chronological priority.
Your Committee did not deem it necessary to include, in Rule 29 the provisions whereby an amendment whose adoption is subject to the adoption or rejection of a subsequent provision of the Report, should be postponed until the Assembly has voted on this provision. In its opinion this rule was merely a corollary of the principles laid down in Rule 29. The Committee also decided that, when a number of amendments were submitted before the opening of a debate at which a difficult discussion was to be anticipated, a marshalled list of amendments should be published in the Assembly Notice, so as to give every Representative a general idea, in advance, of the order in which amendments were to be taken.
Finally, the last paragraph of Rule 29 deals with the reference to a Committee of the whole or part of a Report, and, more especially, with such reference of an amendment. Reference to Committee does not necessarily interrupt the examination of the texts, but defers the vote on the whole text until the Assembly has reached a decision on those amendments or parts of amendments which have been referred to the Committee; consequently provision is made for the Assembly, if need be, to fix a time-limit for the Committee's work, so as to ensure that the adoption of the whole Report shall not be indefinitely delayed.
The notion of enabling the Assembly to decide that an amendment or a paragraph should be disjoined was not retained by your Committee. The idea underlying such a decision would be that a proposed provision falls outside the scope of a particular debate and should therefore be debated separately. To decide on such a separation, therefore, would be tantamount to anticipating a subsequent debate on the question, without its having been included in the Agenda. For this reason, your Committee preferred to recommend in this case the use of the power of the President, if so requested, to rule a provision out of order by virtue of para. 2 of Rule 29, rather than that of disjunction or formal rejection.
A special explanation is necessary regarding what have been called " Orders of the Assembly . Orders differ from Resolutions in that they do not imply the reaching of a decision on the substance of a question but are concerned merely with the organisation of the work of the Assembly and are a matter of strictly internal interest only. Generally speaking, Orders by the Assembly are addressed to Committees, or to the Bureau, or even to the Secretariat- General, or again they may prescribe the conditions for reference to a Committee. The underlying idea of these " Orders " , which have proved particularly useful in cutting down the excessive number of Resolutions, by confining them to their proper field, is merely an adaptation of the British " Order of the House". Motions for Orders do not need to be referred to a Committee, as do texts concerning fundamental questions, such as Motions for Resolutions or Recommendations ; it might even be said that to refer an order to a Committee would in most cases have no purpose or meaning. For example, a proposal to instruct a Committee to pay particular attention to such and such aspect of a question can, and should, be debated and adopted immediately by the Assembly. This would be an Order, and to refer it first to the Committee concerned would really be to complicate matters unduly.
11. Conduct of Debates.
The new Rule 31, relating to the right to speak, groups together certain provisions at present scattered about in various Rules, but without making any substantial modifications therein. Rule 32 was carefully examined by your Committee which endeavoured, by means of a comparative study of different parliamentary procedures, to adopt for our own Assembly a terminology understandable to all. It was found necessary to attempt an exact definition of the equivalents of certain procedural terms in both French and English, of which the principal ones are as follows :
Procedure in respect of the following motions (incidental nature, limited length of speeches, limitation of number of speakers, anonymous voting by sitting and standing)—has not been changed.
Rule 33 suggests the possibility of organising certain debates but leaves the initiative to the Bureau.
12. Voting.
Rules 34 to 37 regarding voting in the Assembly have been considerably changed as to form without, however, any substantial modification. Nevertheless, your Committee considered that conditions for the adoption of particularly important decisions should be made more strict; it proposes that, when the two-thirds majority is required by the Statute, this majority should include at least one-third of the total number of members of the Assembly. A situation will thus be avoided in which a recommendation to the Committee of Ministers, with the possibility of serious political implications, might be adopted as the result of abstentions, though it might have received only an infinitesimal number of votes (for example, twenty for, ten against, with ninety abstentions). In other words, recommendations cannot be adopted if more than two-thirds of the Representatives of the Assembly abstain from voting. Your Committee considered that if this number was not reached they would be right in assuming that the proposed text did not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Assembly. This minimum of one-third is not required for other motions which, being less important, require only a bare majority of votes cast. The Committee attaches no particular significance to the different methods of voting; apart from draft Recommendations or Resolutions, for which an open ballot is obligatory (vote by roll-call), a vote is generally taken by a show of hands—which is an anonymous, uncounted vote—or, if this is not conclusive, a vote by sitting and standing. If, however, at least ten Representatives consider that a vote by rollcall should be taken on any particular point, this must be granted, unless the Rules of Procedure have already laid down that voting is to be by sitting and standing (Rules 12, 32 and 33) or by secret ballot (Rule 8; Rule 34, para. 6; Rule 40, para. 4).
13. Standing Committee.
Rule 39 relating to the Standing Committee appears under a separate heading and not under Part I X dealing with Committees. In this we have an acknowledgement of the fact that the Standing Committee is not a true Committee, but a permanent delegation of the Assembly. Its aim, methods of appointment, work and mode of procedure are fundamentally different from those of the other Committees of the Assembly. Para. 5 of Rule 39 (a) has, moreover, been recast for adaptation and greater clarity.
14. Committees.
In deference to the suggestion of the Committee of Ministers, your Committee has decided to propose the creation of a new General Committee to undertake the tasks at present assigned to the special committee on Refugees and the Sub-Committee on Migrant Workers of the Committee on social questions. This new General Committee, to be described as the " Committee on Population and Refugees is included in the list set forth in Rule 40, paragraph 1.
Extensive additions have been made to Part I X in the form of very full directions; this Part may henceforth be considered the Committees' Charter. Rule 41, referring to the competence of Committees, is entirely new, its aim being to render more explicit the provisions of the present Rules of Procedure, which are too summary. The present form runs as follows " a Committee shall deal with questions referred to it by the Assembly after the General Debate " . Because of the confusion resulting from the fact that certain Committees proceeded " proprio motu " to widen their terms of reference, or even considered that their terms of reference were unrestricted, it is necessary to lay down in the Rules that Committees may only report on questions duly submitted to them. Your Committee further considered that a Committee, as such, could not make a request for inclusion on the Agenda, nor prepare a Report on a question, without having been instructed to do so. They further considered that if a Committee was led in the course of its discussions to raise new problems which it desired to be brought to the notice of the Assembly, the Chairman and members must obtain at least 10 signatures, and submit a request for inclusion in the Agenda, in accordance with the new Rule 15 of the Rules of Procedure.
The purpose of Rule 41, paragraph 2 is to regulate difficulties which might arise regarding the competence of Committees and confirms existing practice.
Rule 42 combines the various provisions dealing with the method of work of the Committees. Various clarifications and modifications have been introduced. First of all, your Committee was of the opinion that, though it might be useful for two Committees or Subcommittees to meet, at the instance of one or the other, to examine certain questions in common, they should not be permitted to extend their joint competence beyond a mere exchange of views or to vote together. Furthermore, para. 4 of the same Rule lays down that in general the Rules applicable to the Assembly in respect of Minutes, discussion of amendments, right to speak, procedural motions and quorum should be extended to Committees and Sub-Committees : this application is, however, subject to certain qualifications, especially in the matter of methods of voting, since it appeared to your Committee that a less rigid and formal procedure was desirable in Committees than in the Assembly. Your Committee also considered that the work of Committees would be unduly impeded if it were insisted, as in the Assembly, that no valid decision of any kind could be taken unless an absolute majority of the members were present. It is therefore laid down that the presence of a third of its members is sufficient to allow the Committee to deliberate (a term which includes voting on such matters as amendments, appointments, internal procedure), but that an absolute majority must be present in order to validate a vote on a Report as a whole. Finally, the system of Substitutes in Committee which is at present dealt with in Rule 37 has been inserted in Rule 42—which is a more suitable place.
15. Reports by Committees.
A special Rule was devoted to the Reports of Committees. Your Committee was guided in this matter by formal decisions taken by the Assembly on various individual cases and by the desire to achieve greater clarity, in the presentation of Reports. Every Report by a Committee should, by reason of the methods of deliberation of the Assembly, consist of a text drawn up in such a way as to permit its adoption by the Assembly after any possible amendments have been made by the latter. This text, called the " Enacting Terms and presented in the form of a Recommendation, Opinion or Resolution, should embody the substance of the Report itself, seeing that it is the only part of the Report which is examined by the Assembly line by line and subsequently adopted and transmitted to the Committee of Ministers. These " Enacting Terms " are generally preceded by an explanatory commentary known as an Explanatory Memorandum, the aim of which is to acquaint the Assembly with the reasons in favour of the draft Recommendation or Resolution. The explanatory memorandum should take account of discussion arising in Committee and should make known for the information of the Assembly, any minority opinion, whereas the preparation of the explanatory memorandum may be entrusted to the Rapporteur, the Enacting Terms must of necessity be agreed to by the Committee.
Your Committee would like to draw the attention of Rapporteurs to the fact that it is the Enacting Terms and not the explanatory memorandum which should, so to speak, go to the heart of the question. To attribute a positive rather than an explanatory value to an explanatory memorandum, and then to request the Assembly simply to acknowledge the explanatory memorandum by the adoption of succinct and formal Enacting Terms, would be to put the cart before the horse and do something quite unnecessary, since the exrjlanatory memorandum is destined to disappear, leaving behind it only the adopted Recommendation or Resolution. One can hardly imagine a judge pronouncing sentence in a series of " whereases or a legislator framing legal rules elsewhere than within the clauses of the laws themselves.
It follows from the rules which strictly limit the contents of a Report to an explanatory memorandum and a statement of Enacting Terms that all theoretical studies, statistical or other data, memoranda of all kinds, or texts submitted by national or international administrations, should be excluded from the Report proper. It is preferable that these appendices, which may be very important in themselves, but which are in no sense the work of the Committee, should be published separately and referred to in the Report, an analysis of them being included, if necessary, in the Explanatory Memorandum. It is undesirable that they should in any way be allowed to overshadow the main body of the Report, which is the work of the Rapporteur and the Committee.
16. Urgent Procedure.
Urgent procedure, which can be invoked only during the session, and not less than three days after it has opened, will inevitably be aimed at modifying the Agenda already settled. Contrary, however, to the procedure for modification of the Agenda prescribed by the new Rule 16 of the Rules of Procedure, the result will be to open a debate immediately or in the very near future.
17. Relations with the Committee of Ministers.
Minor changes have been made in Rules contained in Part X I ; on the one hand, provisions regarding the Joint Committee, and relating to the procedure of the Assembly, have been inserted in the new Rule 46; on the other hand, the rules regarding requests for an Opinion from the Committee of Ministers, which were hitherto too rigid, have been modified and clarified in the new Rule 48.
In this respect it is necessary to define the part played by requests for and Opinion or for further consideration, with reference to the procedure for requests for inclusion in the Agenda of the Session. Two types of cases may arise. If the Committee of Ministers requests the opinion of the Assembly on a question which the latter has not previously examined, the Assembly simply includes it in its Agenda for the Session; this case offers no difficulties. But it often happens that the Assembly, having raised a question itself, and adopted on the subject a Recommendation to the Committee of Ministers, has thereby fully dealt with the question, and has consequently removed it from its Agenda. If it should then happen that the Committee of Ministers request the Assembly to reconsider the question, it submits to it a request for reconsideration of the matter, which entails the re-inclusion of the item in the Agenda.
If, on the other hand, the Recommendation contains suggestions—as, for example, the specific case of a draft convention, the item may be shuttled back and forth between the Committee and the Assembly. In this case the Committee of Ministers makes use of the Request for an Opinion, in order to have a question included in the Agenda of the Assembly (see the method adopted for the European Convention on Human Rights). In both cases the inclusion is to be considered to have been made in due form.
18. Miscellaneous Provisions.
The last Rules, from those relating to " Written Questions " to those concerning the " Revision of the Rules " , have been only slightly modified in form, with the exception of the Rule relating to the raising of parliamentary immunity, which is treated in a separate Report.
19. In preparing these revised Rules of Procedure your Committee has endeavoured to render them more complete, more compact, more logically arranged, and, consequently, less ambiguous in their application; it selected and retained what seemed, in its view, best adapted to its requirements from among the various procedures of the deliberative Assemblies. Finally, it endeavoured to avoid confining the Assembly in a procedural strait-jacket, so that possible future revisions of the Statute would not necessarily involve the entire recasting of the Rules of Procedure.
Consequently your Committee unanimously proposes the adoption of the following draft resolution :
The Rules of Procedure of the Assembly are modi lied as follows :
The Consultative Assembly may be convened in Extraordinary Session upon the initiative either of the Committee of Ministers or of the President of the Assembly, after agreement between them, such agreement also to determine the date of the Session.
1. A preliminary list of questions to be included in the Agenda shall be communicated to Representatives and Substitutes at the same time as the notice mentioned in Rule 1 above.
This list shall contain :
2. A supplementary list shall be published on the fourth day of the Session. It shall contain all questions the inclusion of which in the Agenda shall have been agreed after the publication of the preliminary list specified in paragraph 1 of this Rule.
3. The Bureau shall proceed to co-ordinate the various questions and to establish an order of priority for their discussion. The Draft Agenda thus established shall be submitted to the Assembly, which may amend it.
4. The Assembly shall adopt or reject the Draft Agenda by an absolute majority of the votes cast.
1. Requests for the inclusion of a question in the Agenda shall contain only the title of the proposed question and the reasons in favour of its inclusion in the Agenda.
2. Such requests shall be supported in writing by ten or more Representatives.
3. Requests laid upon the Table for the inclusion of questions in the Agenda of the following Session or part of a Session shall be examined by the Assembly on the last day of the current Session or part of a Session.
Requests presented between Sessions shall be examined by the Standing Committee.
After the opening or resumption of a Session, requests for the inclusion of questions in the Agenda of that Session or part of a Session may be tabled only during the first three days and shall be examined by the Assembly at the end of the third day of the Session, subject, however, to the provisions of Rules 16 and 44 below.
4. The inclusion of a question in the Agenda shall require a two-thirds majority of the votes cast comprising at least one-third of the Representatives of the Assembly or of the members of the Standing Committee, as the case may be.
The debates in the Assembly shall be public, unless the Assembly should decide otherwise.
Every Representative shall sign the register of attendance at each Sitting before taking his place.
Immediately after the adoption of the Minutes of Proceedings of the previous Sitting and before passing to the Orders of the Day, the President shall inform the Assembly of any communications which concern it.
All motions for Recommendations or Resolutions must relate to a question previously included in the Agenda. The President shall judge if such motions are in order.
The majorities required are the following :
The right to vote is an individual one. Voting by proxy is prohibiled. A Substitute authorised to sit in place of a Representative, absent or prevented from taking his seat, shall vote in his own name.
1. A Committee shall meet when convened by its Chairman or at the request of the President of the Assembly, either during or between Sessions.
2. A Committee may, in the interest of its work, appoint one or more sub-committees, of which it shall at the same time determine the composition and competence.
3. Any two or more Committees or sub-committees may hold a joint meeting for the examination of subjects coming within their competence, but may not reach a joint decision.
4. The rules adopted for the Assembly concerning the election of the President and Vice-Presidents, the Minutes of Proceedings, amendments, right to speak, procedural motions, methods of voting, required majorities and quorum, shall apply to the proceedings of Committees and sub-committees, subject to the following provisions :
5. The Chairman of the Committee may take part in discussions and may vote, but without having a casting vote.
6. Any Representative, being a member of a Committee, who is prevented from attending a meeting of that Committee, may arrange to be replaced by another Representative or Substitute of the same nationality as himself. He must give notice to the Chairman, who will in turn inform the Committee. The Representative or Substitute who replaces him and has been nominated in due form shall have the same rights in Committee as the member himself.
A member of a Committee who is unable to attend several Committee meetings should be replaced on each occasion by the same Representative or by the same Substitute, provided that in special cases he may, with the consent of the Chairman of the Committee, arrange to be replaced by another Representative or Substitute of the same nationality as himself.
7. Committee meetings shall be held in private.
Unless a Committee decides to the contrary, Representatives and Substitutes may attend meetings of the Committees of which they are not members but they may not take part in their discussions.
Provided that a Representative or Substitute who has moved a motion which has been referred to a Committee may be invited by that Committee to give evidence before it in an advisory capacity.
8. Minutes of Proceedings shall be drawn up for each Committee meeting. In addition, a summary record of the proceedings shall be compiled to which Representatives may have access but which will not be distributed.
9. Unless the Committee decides otherwise, the only texts which shall he made public shall be the reports which have been adopted as well as statements issued on the responsibility of the Chairman.
The representatives of the Committee of Ministers and their alternates shall have the right of access to the Assembly and its Committees. They shall be given the right to speak whenever they wish. They may not vote.
Progress Reports communicated by the Committee of Ministers to the Assembly, in pursuance of Article 19 of the Statute, shall be included in the Agenda, in accordance with Rule 14 above. At the conclusion of the relevant debate the Assembly shall vote on the text of a reply summarising its observations.
Questions submitted to the Assembly by the Committee of Ministers for an opinion or further consideration shall be included in the agenda in accordance with Rule 14 above. The texts relating thereto which have been laid on the Table shall be referred to the competent Committee, in accordance with paragraph 3 of Rule 27.
Representatives may, through the President, whether the Assembly is in Session or not, address to the Committee of Ministers written questions bearing on items which are or which have been on the Agenda of the Assembly. Questions and answers shall be published by the Secretariat-General.
The service of the Assembly shall be undertaken by a Clerk, with the rank of Deputy Secretary-General, appointed by the Assembly and under the authority of the Secretary- General.