Reforming the Universal Postal Union

Abstract

The Universal Postal Union is a intergovernmental organization founded in 1874 to create a “single postal territory” among “civilized countries.” Since 1874, membership has grown from 22 to 189 countries and now includes virtually every nation on earth. Within the Union, international commerce in documents and parcels is enabled by uniform rules governing the exchange of items between national post offices, each owned by the government of a member country and operated as a public service sustained (in almost all cases) by monopoly rights. Even though the Universal Postal Convention and related agreements have been revised twenty-one times since 1874, the premises on which the Union is built have remained largely unchanged since its founding.¹

Technically, the Universal Postal Convention is not a continuous agreement. Each general congress agrees to a new version of the Convention, and the prior version lapses when the new agreement becomes effective. As this paper is written, the current version of the Universal Postal Convention is the one agreed in Seoul, Korea, in 1994. The version agreed in the Beijing Congress, the twenty-second general congress of the UPU, will become effective on 1 January 2001. In 1964, organizational provisions were deleted from the Convention and placed in a separate document, the Constitution. The 1964 Constitution is a continuous agreement; however, each general congress revises the Constitution with a new “protocol.”