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CONFIDENTIAL
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11
(ii)
Less frequent and shorter meetings.
DSR 11C
CHGM might
meet every three years instead of every other
year; the Commonwealth Finance Ministers
(CFMS) meeting every other year; £N&Ms
and agriculture, health, education and law
Ministers every four years. CHGMs might last
five days instead of nine. CFMS might also
be held in the same place as the IMF and World
Bank meetings, even if this were not in the
Commonwealth Commonwealth, rather than in a separate/capital.
f
(iii)
For all meetings à return to the informality
and privacy of earlier Commonwealth meetings,
in order to encourage a genuine exchangesôf
views on topics of interest.
The CHGM communiqué might be much shorter, and
refer to thetopics discussed, without going
into details. If there were one or two topics
on which Heads of Government wanted to make
a clear statement, this could, as with the
Melbourne Declaration, be issued separately.
It is hard to say in advance how much support
there would be for the ideas at (ii) and (iii)
above, but there would probably be at least some
support for shorter and less structured (though
perhaps not less frequent) meetings. The
Commonwealth Secretary-General has himself
stressed the need for greater informality at
CHGMS, and at least one new Commonwealth country,
Botswana, though the communiqué at Melbourne
/too
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