Proposal for a Council Decision on the position to be adopted, on behalf of the European Union, in the sixty-sixth session of the Executive Committee of the Programme of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees

By letter of 7 September 2015 to the Chair of the Executive Committee of the UNHCR, the Head of the Delegation of the European Union to the United Nations in Geneva requested to examine the ways and means of updating the relevant modalities of the European Union's participation in governing bodies of the UNHCR so that the European Union may envisage its potential participation in Informal Preparatory Consultations.

To accommodate the request, it is expected that the Executive Committee of the UNHCR will be called upon to adopt amendments to its Rules of Procedure at its sixty-sixth session on 5 to 9 October 2015. Rule 46 lays down that any of these rules may be amended by the Executive Committee. Rule 26 lays down that decisions of the Executive Committee shall be made by a majority of the members present and voting. All Member States of the European Union with the exception of Lithuania and Malta are members of the Executive Committee.

By virtue of a decision of the Executive Committee, most recently renewed at its sixty-fourth session on 29 September to 3 October 2014, the European Union is among the intergovernmental organisations be invited by the High Commissioner to send an observer to its public meetings and thus not participating in the adoption of decisions by the Executive Committee.

EUR-Lex: COM(2015)488: Follow the progress of this proposal through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2015:488:FIN

---