Sessions

The Committee on Contributions meets annually for 3 to 4 weeks, usually in June of each year. The report of the Committee is considered by the General Assembly through the Fifth Committee at the following main session.

Every year the Committee considers requests for exemption under Article 19 of the Charter. The Committee also reviews the status of multi-year payment plans, and elements of the methodology of the scale of assessments.

Sixty-ninth session

The Committee held its sixty-ninth session from 1 to 26 June 2009. The report of the Committee is contained in document A/64/11.

With regard to the methodology for the scale of assessments, the Committee:

       (a) Decided to review the scale for the period 2010-2012 pursuant to rule 160 of the rules of procedure of the General Assembly and General Assembly resolution 58/1 B;

       (b) Recalled and reaffirmed its recommendation that the scale should be based on the most current, comprehensive and comparable data available for gross national income;

       (c) Recalled and reaffirmed its recommendation that market exchange rates should be used in preparing the scale except where that caused excessive fluctuations and distortions in income;

       (d) Agreed that, once chosen, there were advantages in using the same base period for as long as possible so as to smooth out over the course of consecutive scale periods the impact for every Member State;

       (e) Decided to consider further at future sessions the questions of the debt burden adjustment and the low per capita income adjustment;

       (f) Decided to adjust market exchange rates for Iraq and to use United Nations operational rates for the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Myanmar and the Syrian Arab Republic;

       (g) Considered the application of the new data to the methodology used in preparing the current scale and included the results for information.

The Committee also decided to study further the questions of automatic annual recalculation and large scale-to-scale changes in rates of assessment on the basis of any guidance thereon by the General Assembly.

With regard to multi-year payment plans, the Committee noted the completion by Tajikistan of payments under its plan and recommended that the General Assembly encourage other Member States in arrears for the purposes of the application of Article 19 of the Charter of the United Nations to consider submitting multi-year payment plans.

With regard to the application of Article 19 of the Charter, the Committee recommended that the following Member States be permitted to vote in the General Assembly until the end of the sixty-fourth session of the Assembly: the Central African Republic, the Comoros, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Sao Tome and Principe and Somalia.

Under other matters the Committee:

         (a) Recommended a notional rate of assessment of 0.001 per cent for the Holy See, as a non-member State, for the period 2010-2012;

         (b) Decided to hold its seventieth session from 7 to 25 June 2010.

           

.