Ladies and Gentlemen,
Dear Colleagues,
Distinguished Delegates,

I am very much grateful to all of you, because of being elected as the chairman of this very important conference by you. Thank you for your kind support and I would wish that your support will continue throughout the conference in order to make it a successful one.

As many of you are aware that there are many important issues on our agenda, and we are almost obliged to finalize all of them before the last day of the conference. Because, if we leave any issue pending until the forthcoming conference we will be overloading that conference since it will have its own heavy load. This is why I will need everybody’s indulgence and help during our deliberations to be more flexible and more creative.

As you all know there are many important and difficult issues on the agenda. But, some of them are more difficult to be resolved. Among these are;

Since the time provided for the conference is only four weeks , I would suggest to start our work immediately in order to be able to finalize it in good time and not to have night or overnight sessions. And please take note that in any case we shall be finalizing our work by 17:00 hours on Thursday 1st of June in order to facilitate the necessary procedures to close the conference in a timely manner.

I also would like to warn everybody that, this is a rather technical based conference. This is why I would kindly urge you not to go for vote as long as possible.

Not asking for any kind of point of order would be very much appreciated. This will ease and speed up our work.