The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced the re-nomination of the United Arab Emirates to the membership of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) Council for the period (2010-2014), for the second time in a row, in addition to the nomination for the first time of one of the TRA engineers for the membership of the Radio Regulation Board (RRB) for the same period. The election for both posts will take place over the next ITU Plenipotentiary Conference (PP10), to be held in the Mexican city of Guadalajara, from October 4th till 22nd, 2010.

The Emirati candidate to fill one of the 12 seats, which make up the RRB, is Engineer Nasser Abdullatif. Bin Hammad, Senior Manager International Affairs at the TRA.  Nasser Bin Hammad occupied many positions locally and internationally, where he attended and chaired several meetings at the ITU. He is also responsible for the coordination of the UAE space services and the Arab Spectrum Management Group.

At present Eng. Nasser is leading a team of technical and regulatory experts for advising the UAE government on the policy issues related to the ITU, International Radio-communications and Spectrum Management. Bin Hammad chaired Working Group 5A, which was responsible for five Agenda Items, at the last World Radio Conference (WRC-07) and he is currently the Vice Chairman of the Study Group 4 of the ITU-R related to Space Services for the period (2007-2012).

H.E. Mohamed Nasser Al Ghanim TRA Director General commented on Eng. Nasser’s nomination saying: “Eng. Nasser is one of the young promising leaders, prepared by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) to represent the UAE in a distinguished way at the international events related to the ICT in general and radio-communication in particular.”

Given the special nature of the Board, the election of RRB is considered to be one of the key events that occur during the Plenipotentiary Conferences; the RRB main mandate is to remove any conflicts that may arise between Member States on Radio matters in General and interference cases in specific on radio wireless and satellite networks. It also provides advice to the Radio-communication Conferences and to the Radio-communication Assemblies and considers special requests by Administrations on decisions made by the Radio-communication Bureau regarding frequency assignments and interference cases.

The RRB consists of twelve members, who perform their duties independently. The election is carried out by dividing the member states of the ITU into five geographic regions. The UAE is located in region E (Asia- Australia), which witnesses the strongest competition as it has seven candidates vying for three seats only, unlike the other regions which have less nomination.  

The TRA prepared a comprehensive electoral program to mobilize the regional and the international support for Eng. Nasser Bin Hammad nomination.  In case of success, Nasser Bin Hammad will be the first Emirati to occupy this position and the UAE will be the first GCC country to be a member at the RRB

Despite the challenging competition at the  next RRB elections, where Bin Hammad is facing strong competitors, whom enjoy wide fame in the area of radio-communications, nevertheless he is considered as strong candidate due to his obvious activity in the previous years in international domain and the good reputation he received through his participation in multiple activities in the ITU and in its three sectors (ITU-R, ITU-T & ITU-D).