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Esteemed Professor Scherer, 
Ladies and Gentlemen, 
Dear Friends,

Allow me please, on behalf of the Secretary-General, Mr. Yoshio UTSUMI, who regrets that he is unable to be with us today, and on my own behalf, to welcome you to ITU.

It is both an honour and a pleasure for ITU to have been selected by a law firm as prestigious as Baker & McKenzie, with over 2400 legal experts in 35 different countries, to host a working meeting of its European specialists in the field of telecommunication law.

At the same time, I am bold enough and, I have to admit, proud enough to suspect that the extraordinarily rapid development of new information technologies, the imminent appearance on the market of third-generation mobiles, the liberalization of telecommunication markets and the crucial role played in that regard by national regulatory and supervisory bodies, and, last but not least, the exponential growth in e-commerce – all areas in which ITU plays a leading, or at least catalytic role – had something to do with your choice of venue.

It goes without saying that the three hours’ discussion time we have at our disposal will be all to inadequate for addressing these areas of interest in any great depth. However, I would wager that our broad presentation of the Union’s activities will serve to enhance your insight into the role – to my mind a fundamental one – that the Union has thus far played and, I have not doubt, will continue to play in the field of telecommunication development, provided of course that it is capable of adapting to the constantly evolving environment of this sector of activity. Indeed – and this is my wish – the overview we shall be presenting to you may even lead you to consider the possibility of more regular and closer contacts between your firm and the work of the Union.

In the best interests of achieving this objective, today’s programme will embrace the broadest possible range of subjects.

It will comprise three parts, moving, so to speak, from the general to the specific.

• To begin with, our general introduction to ITU and its various constituent elements will enable you to appreciate, among other things, that the Union, unlike other agencies within the United Nations family, has an altogether unique and quasi-federal institutional structure. Particular attention will also be drawn in this part of the programme to an activity that not only forms a major part of ITU’s work, but is also quite unusual for an intergovernmental organization, namely the organization of world and regional telecommunication exhibitions.
• Following a brief question-and-answer session, we shall move on to the second part of our afternoon, where we shall be looking at the role that ITU is playing in certain areas of the telecommunication sector that are currently "booming" (I refer here to the Internet and third-generation mobiles). We shall also be focusing on the legal issues which are liable to require ITU’s attention at the dawn of a twenty-first century which, for certain thinkers such as André Malraux, will be spiritual if it is to be anything at all, and which I myself, more prosaically, foresee as being hallmarked, and indeed underpinned, by telecommunications.

To conclude this second part, and by way of a relaxing interlude, we shall be highlighting a number of specific legal features of ITU vis-à-vis general international law which make the Union a particularly strange animal in the eyes of international law theorists.

• Once our ITU officials have, I hope, provided you with abundant food for thought, they will in turn be looking to you, Ladies and Gentlemen, for an insight into the legal questions and problems with which you are daily confronted as practitioners in the field of telecommunication law. This will, if you so agree, constitute the substance of the third and final part of this session which, I feel I can confidently say, can be described as quite a "condensed" one.

I will be asking Mr. Guillot, the Union’s Legal Adviser, to very briefly introduce to you each of the speakers before they take the floor.

It is my hope that this afternoon’s programme will live up to your expectations and enable you to discover this, the oldest – yet in my view one of the most dynamic - of the United Nations agencies, in a new light.

I should also like to take this opportunity to wish you every success in your ongoing work.

I thank you for your attention, and should now like to pass the floor to Mr. Guillot, who will introduce the first speaker.

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