Palestine to receive and pay terminal dues

Palestine came one step closer last week to being able to participate in direct mail exchanges with all UPU member countries.

Palestine came one step closer last week to being able to participate in direct mail exchanges with all UPU member countries.

On Friday, the UPU Council of Administration adopted a resolution that classifies Palestine for terminal dues and Quality of Service Fund (QSF) purposes, a prerequisite for integrating the Palestinian postal service into the worldwide postal community.

The Israeli and Palestinian Posts had jointly declared they would work to achieve this last August in Geneva during the 24th Universal Postal Congress.

According to the latest resolution, Palestine will now receive payment for processing postal items exchanged with other countries (called terminal dues), as well as pay such dues to countries processing mail coming from its territory.

Palestine will also be able to rely on the QSF to finance projects aimed at improving the quality of its postal service.

All countries, except the least developed countries, contribute to the fund through the terminal dues they pay.

Speaking on behalf of Arab countries, the United Arab Emirates delegate thanked everyone for working to ensure that every citizen, including every Palestinian citizen, might be entitled to receive postal services.

For its part, Israel reiterated, “in a spirit of cooperation”, its commitment to continue the bilateral work initiated to facilitate the integration of the Palestinian postal services into the worldwide postal community and finding technical and operational solutions for improving these services.

The UPU Postal Operations Council will explore further operational measures when it meets in April 2009.