 We're here at the ITU studio in Geneva and I'm very pleased to be joined by Mr. Bruce Gracie who's special advisor for International Organisations of Canada and he's also Chairman of the ITU Council Working Group on Financial and Human Resources. Bruce, thank you very much indeed for being with us today. It's my pleasure. I'd like to start off by asking you about your views on the continued implementation and linkages between strategic and financial planning. Perhaps I could tell you a few things about the history of this linkage in ITU. Bruce goes back as far as 1998, the Plan of Attenture Conference, where the first resolution was adopted on linking the three basic planning elements. At the Council the following year in 1999 I had the pleasure of being appointed as the Chairman of the new Council Working Group on Financial Regulations and that group has been active ever since through many stages of improvements and evolution towards where we are today. Now we've gone through the process of implementing results-based budgeting. We've now in the process of implementing results-based management and you'll note in the consideration of the budget that has just been approved by Council, at least in the level of the Standing Committee, that the budget structure is now linked to results-based budgeting. Now by that I mean the objectives and the outputs from the sectors, the three sectors and the General Secretariat, are now linked to budget appropriations, which I think is a huge step in increasing the transparency and accountability of the ITU processes as far as the membership is concerned. That's brilliant. And is ITU Council addressing a new strategic plan for human resources that would reflect the future direction of the Union and your opinion? Well in the last several meetings of the Council Working Group on Finance and HR, this issue has been addressed and we have reports from the Human Resources Department of the ITU and they have brought us up to date on what they're doing in evolving the Human Resources strategic plan. If I can speak on behalf of the membership, who participates in the Council Working Group, we're very pleased to see the results of what is being done in modernizing the HR function in ITU, not only in response to UN best practices, but also in response to the needs and interests of the staff and the membership. So we're very pleased with the results. During the Council session, you referred to the need for gender mainstreaming in ITU's HR process. I would like to ask you, how do you see ITU striking a gender balance? Well that's a sensitive issue, an important issue. I think that there's now momentum building on developing a gender perspective or further developing a gender perspective in ITU. A resolution, resolution 70, has been adopted. A number of initiatives and projects have been undertaken. The UN has a UN system-wide initiative in place to address the many issues associated with a gender perspective. Now as far as ITU is concerned, and in view of the upcoming Plenipotentiary Conference, when I had intervened this morning I had encouraged the membership to prepare specific proposals and comments on gender mainstreaming in ITU for the consideration of the Plenipotentiary Conference, which can be reflected in Resolution 48, which deals with human resources development, human resources management. So on the basis of that I believe that we can move forward in a very positive direction. I was going to ask you, ITU was very much in the limelight last year. It had a lot of attention drawn to it for all sorts of different reasons. I wanted to find out what your opinion is on the future of ITU. Well, last year we started with the WRC. Now the World Radio Conference, I believe there's complete consensus on the importance of these events and the WRC in 2012 was no exception. So the results were very positive. Everyone's looking forward to another extremely busy and comprehensive conference in 2015, and that's another decision that was just made by Council that it will remain in 2015. Now the World Conference on International Telecommunications, as everyone knows, that conference had not been held since 1988. The environment had changed dramatically, and countries were not really sure exactly what to expect in revising the International Telecommunication Regulations. As a result, and because of the different motivations that countries had, the results were mixed. However, since that time, I believe that things have evolved in a very positive direction. In particular, there is now explicit recognition that the ITU needs to consider ways and means of opening its membership, involving multi-stakeholders in the course of its work and finding mechanisms to do that, without sacrificing the basic purposes of the ITU as an intergovernmental organization that requires payments from its member states and sector members, associates, and academia. It's a difficult issue on how to expand the membership of the organization and involve more stakeholders in its work, but I do believe that we're up to the challenges and that we look forward to proposals and options that we can consider at Council, at plenary-potentiary conferences, and elsewhere. Bruce Gracie, thank you very much for being with us today. My pleasure. Thank you.