As the Secretariat commences its preparations for CCAMLR-XXXI and associated meetings I take this opportunity to remind delegations of the following guidelines for the preparation of meeting documents. Adhering to these guidelines will assist the Secretariat to provide efficient support to our 2012 meetings.

All papers considered by the Commission and the Scientific Committee to support the taking of decisions are denominated ‘Working Papers’. Papers which provide background information only are ‘Background Papers’.

Working Papers require translation into the CCAMLR’s official languages. To guarantee translation, the deadline for submission to the Secretariat is 45 days prior to the beginning of the meeting. Background Papers, including reports from observers to the meeting, should be submitted to the Secretariat no later than 30 days prior to the beginning of the meeting.

Submissions for the 2012 meetings are due by:

• Commission Working Papers: Saturday 8 September
• Commission Background Papers: Sunday 23 September
• Scientific Committee Working Papers: Friday 7 September
• Scientific Committee Background Papers: Saturday 22 September.

To be compatible with the translation memory program used by the Secretariat, Working Papers need the following formatting:

• for documents submitted as revisions, new text should be formatted in bold and deleted text formatted as strike-through; not in track-change mode
• paragraphs are not to be auto numbered nor auto bulleted (numbers and bullet points need to be typed).

For more information about submission of papers, please visit the Submission of papers to the meetings of the Commission or Submission of papers to meetings of the Scientific Committee pages of the CCAMLR website.

Andrew Wright

Executive Secretary