BRITISH DRAFT PROPOSAL ON PROCEDURES  

20 June 2001

Procedures

1 - Applications for each export of commodities and products to be financed from the escrow account established pursuant to paragraph 7 of resolution 986 (1995) should be forwarded to the Office of the Iraq Programme (OIP) by the exporting states through permanent or observer missions, or by United Nations agencies and programmes. Each application should include the maximum technical specifications and end-user information in order for a determination to be made on whether the contract contains any item referred to in paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991) or any item on the Goods Review List (GRL), and indicate that the exporter seeks payments from the escrow account. A copy of the concluded contractual arrangements should be attached to the application.

2 - Each application and the concluded contractual arrangements will be reviewed by customs experts in the OIP and experts from UNMOVIC, consulting the IAEA as necessary, in order to determine whether the contract contains any item referred to in paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991) or included on the GRL.  The OIP will identify an official to act as a contact point on each contract.

3 - In order to verify that the conditions set out in paragraph 2 above are met, the experts may request additional information from the exporting States or Iraq. The exporting states or Iraq should provide the additional information requested within a period of 60 days. If the experts do not require any additional information within four working days, the procedure under paragraphs 5, 6 and 7 below applies.

4 - If the experts determine that the exporting state or Iraq has not provided the additional information within the period set out in paragraph 3 above, the application will not proceed further until the necessary information has been provided.

5. - If the UNMOVIC experts, consulting the IAEA as necessary, determine that the contract contains any item referred to in paragraph 24 of resolution 687 (1991), the application shall be considered lapsed and returned to mission or agency which submitted it.

6 – If the UNMOVIC experts, consulting the IAEA as necessary, determine that the contract contains any item referred to in the GRL, they will forward to the Committee full details of the GRL listed items, including the technical specifications of the items and the associated contract.  OIP will immediately inform the missions or agencies concerned.  The remaining items in the contract, which are determined as not included in the GRL, will be processed according the procedure in paragraph 7 below.

7 - If the UNMOVIC experts, consulting the IAEA as necessary, determine that the contract does not contain any item referred to in paragraph 2 above, they the Office of the Iraq Programme will inform immediately the Government of Iraq and the exporting State in written form.   The exporter will be eligible for payment upon verification by Cotecna that the goods have arrived as contracted in Iraq.

8 - No expert from either the OIP or UNMOVIC will review a contract submitted by an exporting state of which the expert is a national. Moreover no expert from either the OIP or UNMOVIC shall review a contract which indicates that the goods concerned originate from a State of which the expert is a national.

9  8 - If the mission or agency submitting a contract disagrees with the decision to refer the contract to the Committee, it may appeal against this decision within two business days to the Executive Director of OIP.  In that event, the Executive Director of OIP, in consultation with the Executive Chairman of UNMOVIC, will appoint experts to re-consider the contract in accordance with the procedures set out above.  Their decision, endorsed by the Executive Director and Executive Chairman, will be final and no further appeals will be permitted. The application shall not be forwarded to the Committee until the appeal period has expired without an appeal being filed.

10 9 – The Secretariat will report to the Committee at the end of each 180-day phase on the contracts submitted and approved for export to Iraq during this period and provide to any member of the Committee at the member’s request copies of applications for information purposes only.

11 10 - Any Committee member may call for an urgent meeting of the Committee to consider revising or revoking these procedures. The Committee will keep these procedures under review and, in light of experience, will amend them as appropriate.