On December 19th the Court of Arbitration received an official complaint from PPAU "[challenging] against motions relating to affiliation fees at the 2014 General Assembly". The full complaint can be found here: Full complaint
The request from PPAU is as follows:
"The Court of Arbitration is requested to do the following:
- Immediately introduces an injunction against the PPI board regarding requesting or accepting membership fees until this case is concluded, as per the powers of XIVa(1) and (3)(a);
- Makes a determination that "fixed in relation to the finances and membership of parties" should be interpreted to mean a consistently applied formula for determining fees based on that criteria, without exception;
- Makes a determination that the General Assembly did not approve any affiliation fee that would meet the requirements of XVI(1), either due to lack of a motion meeting those requirements, or a motion failing to carry due to the requirements of XI(2);
- Makes a determination that motions relating to affiliation fees must meet all of the requirements ofXI(2), XVI(1) and XVI(2);
- Makes a determination as to whether or not XVI applies to observer members, as XV(a) seems to imply;
- Makes a determination as to whether or not the current PPI board is meeting the requirements ofXVII(3), which is necessary for the purpose of knowing whether it is safe to send affiliation fees to the PPI board. Should the board be found to not be meeting these requirements, they should be required to apply to the CoA for a determination on whether they meet XVII(3) prior to requesting any affiliation fees in the future, and;
- Makes a determination that any attempt by the PPI board to accrue affiliation fees to be without authority or basis until a future General Assembly resolves otherwise."
After carefully reading the argumentation from PPAU and looking into this, the Court of Arbitration concluded that:
As mentioned by PPAU in request 3: the PPI statutes XI(2) state that any motions on affiliation fees need to be carried by a 2 third majority. The minutes of the 2014 GA state the following result for the vote on the affiliation fees: 12 yes, 9.5 no, 2 Abstensions.
This is not a 2 third majority and therefor the motion is not approved. This means that the current affiliation fees are still 0 euro as they were before this vote on the 2014 GA.
The Court of Arbitration comes to conclude (relating request 1 and 7) that the PPI board right now does not have the authority to ask any affiliation fees from any PPI member. However a PPI member is always free to give a voluntary donation to PPI as it sees fit.
As for the requests in point 2, 4, 5 and 6, the Court of Arbitration feels these requests are no longer urgent right now as affiliation fees are at the moment 0 euro. It is better to have an agreement between members about this instead of a ruling by the Court of Arbitration.
Therefor the Court proposes to have a discussion at length on the affiliation fees with all the members on the next GA to clear things out. This discussion should also include the points raised by PPAU, but not handled by the Court of Arbitration right now.
Kind regards,
The Court of Arbitration
Bradley Hall, Gijs Peskens, Vasilis Perantzakis, Henrique Peer, Kjell Segers
