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The IGO monitors
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page 46
about to set up as a rival to existing bodies with responsibility in this area. This clarity smoothed the path, he says, for collaboration with the Agency on satellite meteorology from polar orbit.
Besides adding routine climate monitoring to EUMETSAT's objectives, the amended Convention included a number of further changes. Specific programmes, other than the existing MOP, were not referred to within the Convention, thus eliminating the need for parliamentary ratification of every change in a new
programme's content. The amended Convention also allowed both mandatory and optional programmes. Mandatory programmes were defined as "basic programmes required to continue the provision of observations from geostationary and polar orbit" and they need a unanimous vote from the Council. There was nothing to preclude satellite programmes being adopted as optional if unanimity could not be reached. Finally, the amended Convention made a number of practical changes to the financial rules.
The fifteenth Council meeting in June 1991 adopted a Resolution recommending the amended Convention to the Member States. Ratification began that year and was finally completed in 2000. In the meantime, Member States applied many of the agreed amendments when they adopted new programmes. Until the Convention was ratified, however, it was not possible to pursue a programme as optional if unanimity could not be reached. As a consequence, the Council has had to work hard to find ways to define programmes and procedures that maintained agreement among all the Member States.
In terms of EUMETSAT's evolution as an Organisation, however, the fifteenth Council is significant not only because voting opened on amendments to the Convention, but also because the Secretariat proposed a new Long Term Management Policy to the delegates. That Policy was to redefine EUMETSAT's role in the definition, development, procurement and operation of its ground and space segments.
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