From its signing in 1959, the Antarctic Treaty had operated without any continuing administrative institution. After agreeing on the need to establish a permanent secretariat and several years of debate on possible locations for its offices, at the ATCM XXIV (St. Petersburg, 2001) the Parties reached a consensus to establish the Secretariat in the capital city of Argentina and began discussions on the establishment of a headquarters agreement and foundational regulations.

On 1 September 2004, the Secretariat of the Antarctic Treaty formally began operations in Buenos Aires. From that date on, the Secretariat has continuously worked to strengthen the Antarctic Treaty system and ensure that all activities in Antarctica are consistent with the purposes and principles of the Antarctic Treaty and its Protocol on Environmental Protection. Such work includes many activities and tasks that, in pre-Secretariat times, were either performed by the Host Country during meetings or not performed at all.

This webpage summarizes these activities, tasks and outputs, by focusing on five main areas: Meeting organization, Information repositories, Tools and resources for delegates, Exchange of information, and Institutional and ATCM / CEP Memory.

The Secretariat and its work are funded by the Consultative Parties. The Secretariat’s budget is approved each year at the ATCM, while Financial Regulations govern its management. Despite the growth in activities and tasks, the Secretariat’s budget has remained almost constant since 2011, allowing for a zero nominal increase in the Parties’ contributions since 2014. Likewise, since 2006/07 the number of personnel working at the Secretariat only increased by one staff member in 2015/16 and has remained stable thereafter.

Annex 1 contains a timeline with information on the products, services and reports provided by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat as well as relevant Secretariat Papers presented to meetings since its establishment.

Annex 2 shows the same information related to Secretariat staff both in Buenos Aires and as supporting staff at meetings since 2004. Additionally, in the same period, 21 trainees from 12 Parties worked at the Secretariat.

Before 2004 all arrangements for organizing an ATCM were the responsibility of the Host Country. The criteria used to perform all these activities were not uniform over time and, since all the necessary information on how to proceed on these issues was not recorded, it was up to each meeting’s Host Country to find out how to do it each year.

To assist with this complex process, the Host Country had to rely on its own staff, who were usually unfamiliar with the meeting practices and procedures.

The Secretariat is now responsible for most of the routine tasks and services that support each ATCM, including translation and interpretation, note-taking, communication to Parties and managing of documents and reports. Additionally, to help Host Countries in the organization of ATCMs, the ATS produced and keeps updated an internal document, the Organizational Manual, which fully describes all the arrangements needed when planning an ATCM.

Before 2004, registration to meetings was done directly with the Host Country and verified using printed lists, and delegates’ participation in the meeting was unknown to other delegates until the meeting started. Online registration and delegate lists provided on the Secretariat website now keep delegates informed regarding who is participating in the next meeting, while easing the workload of the Host Country in making precise arrangements according to the number of meeting participants.

Before the ATS was established, papers were submitted to the Meeting as attachments to e-mails sent to the Host Country. This method often did not permit delegates to easily confirm whether the paper had been received, or check if a paper was in the process of translation and/or publication. Papers were printed and distributed in “pigeonholes” from which delegates manually retrieved them. Revised versions of papers had to be re-printed, and it was often difficult to determine whether all delegations had the most recent paper versions at the start of each session

To deal with all these tasks, the ATS has developed several tools to manage documentation before and during the meeting. In the months preceding the ATCM a platform for uploading meeting documents replaced the traditional practice of submissions by e-mail. It speeded up their processing and facilitated proper classification, providing delegates with information on the status of the submitted documents. During the meeting, the section dedicated to meeting papers allows delegates to easily identify the most updated version of documents and to almost completely do away with printed material.

After the establishment of the Secretariat, several databases and information repositories were gradually created, enabling quick and structured access to information that was previously dispersed in various digital or analog sources.

One of the first of such repositories to be developed was the Antarctic Treaty Database which contains the texts of all Recommendations, Measures, Decisions and Resolutions, and other measures adopted by the ATCM, together with their attachments and information on their legal status.

Of highest relevance to the work of the CEP, the Secretariat developed two databases containing Environmental Information: the EIA Database including details on all IEEs and CEEs submitted by Parties and the Protected Areas database. This last database contains the texts of the management plans for Antarctic Specially Protected Areas and Antarctic Specially Managed Areas as well as their legal status, location, and a summary of the purpose of designation. It also contains information related to the list and location of Historic Sites and Monuments in Antarctica.

More recently, based on a previously static list of Inspections, the Secretariat developed the Inspections Database, containing details of all inspections carried out by Parties under Article VII of the Treaty and Article 14 of the Protocol since 1962, as well as links to the available inspection reports and other documents discussed at the ATCM in relation to these inspections.

The Secretariat staff continuously updates and monitors these information repositories, based on information received from the ATCM, directly from Parties and from the Depositary Government of the Antarctic Treaty.

Before the ATS was established, no reliable or central source of information on the Meeting’s rules, procedures and norms was available to delegates. This lack of guidance impeded delegates’ ability to adequately prepare for ATCMs. In response to this, the Secretariat developed the ATCM Workspace and CEP Workspace with a variety of tools and resources for delegates.

These sections now include ATCM and CEP guidelines and procedures, ATCM and CEP strategic work plans, invoices and acknowledgements of Parties’ contributions, circulars, delegation contact points, and other useful information.

The Secretariat also created different web-based sections aimed to provide quick access to all necessary information to participate in the meetings. The ATS has included in these sections ad-hoc material to assist delegates when preparing meeting documents: the Tips to write meeting papers and the Guidelines for the formatting of documents.

During the meeting, report editing tasks require coordination of the work of rapporteurs, editors and secretaries of the Working Groups and plenaries. In pre-Secretariat times, delegates had no opportunity to propose changes to draft reports until the moment the adoption process began. In recent years, the Secretariat developed an on-line draft report commenting system which allows delegates designated as meeting report contributors to provide comments to draft reports, within timeframes allocated by the chairs, and compiles them automatically for the Secretariat editing team to process and incorporate the comments to the reports before the start of the sessions.

With respect to the delegates’ intersessional work, it is worth mentioning that, before the establishment of the Secretariat, almost all ATCM- and CEP-related activities concentrated on the meeting itself. Technological advances in communication tools, mainly internet-based, offered new opportunities to make progress on certain ATCM/CEP issues between meetings. Initially, these intersessional discussions took place through e-mail. Later, the Secretariat created web-based discussion forums for the ATCM and the CEP.

Since 2007/08, more than 80 intersessional activities have been carried out on the ATCM forum. CEP intersessional activities began in 2004/05 and an archive containing records of the more than 130 activities carried out so far is now accessible on the ATS website.

Finally, the Contact Database allows delegates to search for contact details of other delegates and assign specific permissions to interact with the Secretariat information systems. This database also provides the platform for on-line registration to the meetings.

In pre-Secretariat times, information that had to be exchanged among Parties according to Articles III of the Antarctic Treaty, was circulated through official channels. More recently, Article 17 of the Environmental Protocol established that reports on the steps taken to implement it shall be circulated and considered at the following Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting. Some Parties decided to comply with these regulations by means of submitting and Information Paper to the ATCM and CEP.

These non-centralized document-based methods made it very hard to review the information provided. Disparity of data formats and structure made it almost impossible to compare the information submitted by Parties or perform any valuable quantitative analysis .To enable exchanging information online, the Secretariat implemented, through its website, the Electronic Information Exchange System (EIES), which allowed Parties to provide their Annual Reports, as well as their Pre-season and Permanent information. Since its establishment, the EIES has been continuously enhanced with new tools and resources to facilitate the Parties’ entering of data.

In addition, with the information annually provided by Parties through the EIES, the Secretariat also developed Summarized reports and an associated Maps section on a variety of issues, such as visited sites, Environmental Impact Assessments, Protected Areas, Inspections, Automatic Recording Stations, and Sites of Past Activities.

To aid the work of EIES users, the Secretariat has prepared several EIES tutorials, and more recently, it began providing virtual training sessions that allow EIES operators to build and keep their EIES-related capabilities updated. Since their initial implementation in 2022, 15 countries have benefited from participating in such sessions.

Before the Secretariat was established, a comprehensive repository for meeting documents did not exist. The only relevant precedent was the CEP web portal administered by Australia, which contained the discussion documents as well as all CEP reports.

The ATS made available the Meeting Documents Archive, a searchable tool that includes an archive of all meeting documents since the first ATCM. To prepare this database, the ATS made an extensive search among Parties to recover all missing documents. Today, the database contains almost all papers ever submitted to ATCM and CEP meetings and other meeting-related documents and constitutes a very valuable source of information for delegates and general public working on the ATCM and CEP history.

Regarding Final Reports, prior to the establishment of the Secretariat, their preparation, translation, publication and distribution were the responsibility of each Host Country. Today, these tasks fall to the Secretariat. This shift not only eased the budget of Host Countries but also increased consistency in the form and content of the Final Report. In addition, all ATCM Final Reports can now be found in a centralised source, available on the ATS website.

The Secretariat has prepared nearly 40 reports on different issues, submitted to the meeting as Secretariat papers. These have included reviews, summaries, analyses, and updates on a variety of matters, such as the status of ATCM measures, the ATCM Multi-year Strategic Work Plan, discussions held or actions taken by the CEP/ATCM on certain issues, and matters related to tourism, liability, and environmental remediation, among others.

Other Secretariat papers have been regularly submitted to the ATCM to report on technical developments made on different web-based tools and resources provided by the Secretariat, including databases, maps, the EIES and the ATS website.

For detailed information on the services and products provided, as well as papers submitted by the Antarctic Treaty Secretariat since its establishment, see the next section.