New sphinxes

The diplomats that haunt our meetings are fascinating people, but I sometimes find them hard to follow.

For instance, not a day goes by or a delegate grumbles, quite rightly, to the secretariat because the documents are available only in English. What does this same delegate do to overcome this deficiency? He votes in favour of a $19 million cut in the budget of conference services, thus reducing the secretariat’s translation capacity.

Other examples of severe schizophrenia: delegates complain bitterly that the documents are available only at the last minute and that they don’t have time to study them in depth. The solution is to post those documents on the Internet as soon as possible. What do those delegates do to help the secretariat? They decide to reduce the Organization’s IT budget by $7 million.

Where’s the logic in all this? Maybe in a little provocative quote from Victor Hugo, who said that a diplomat was a man paid to try to solve problems that would never have occurred if there had been no diplomats in the first place.

The Editor-in-Chief, Jean Michel Jakobowicz.