5

Meetings of the Deputies were held fairly regularly from this date, and the Council of Foreign Ministers came to adopt a joint policy towards most of the amendments. In general, if one member of the Council ■opposed an amendment submitted by a non-Council member, all four rejected it. The Plenary Conference met on 30 August, when the Greek delegation asked for leave to present on a later day a motion asking the Conference to suggest that the Council of Foreign Ministers should consider its boundary dispute with Albania (specifically Northern Epirus). After an acrimonious debate the Conference agreed by 12 votes to 7 (U.S.S.R., Ukraine, Byelo-Russia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, France), with 2 abstentions (Belgium and Norway), to discuss the Greek-Albanian frontier at its next meeting. The decision was not implemented at the next meeting of the Plenary Conference on 6 September, nor did the agenda for the next meeting (not held until 26 September and called for the purpose of considering means of speeding up the work of the Conference) make reference to Greek-Albanian territorial questions. When this discrepancy was pointed out by the delegate of Yugoslavia, the Greek delegation announced that it did not wish the matter to remain upon the agenda of the Conference, but reserved the right to raise the question before the Council of Foreign Ministers. At a meeting on 8 September, after the Conference had been in session six weeks without achieving any very tangible results, the Council of Foreign Ministers decided to recommend that, in view of the lack of technical staff and experts to staff the national and international secretariats of two full-scale conferences, the meeting of the General Assembly of the United Nations should be postponed from 23 September to 23 October. The other United Nations agreed to this date, which naturally set a time-limit to the Paris Conference. On 12 September the General Secretariat informed the delegations that the work of the Commissions should be completed by 5 October in order to allow ten days of Plenary Sessions before the Conference concluded on 15 October. As a result, the Chairmen of some Commissions endeavoured to secure agreement to the enforcement of a time-table of work and curtailment of speeches, some of which were taking as long as three hours (including translation time). At this stage, with only three weeks of Commission work remaining, 30 out of the 78 articles of the Italian treaty had been approved, and 70 of the 92 amendments remained to be considered ; 22 of the 38 articles of the Roumanian treaty had been approved and 8 of 15 amendments disposed of; only the Preamble of the Bulgarian treaty and the Preamble and part of the first article of the Hungarian treaty had been approved; and 15 of the 34 articles of the Finnish treaty had been approved. The Council of Foreign Ministers met again on 24 and 25 September, and on 26 September the Plenary Conference approved their suggestions that the Commissions should adopt programmes of work and of voting