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Annual General Assembly 2024
CIT’s annual General Assembly was held on 23 November 2024 in Bern, chaired by CIT Chair Maria Sack and CIT Vice-Chair Maria Urbanska.
A corporate but also networking event, with effective exchanges on legal interoperability in the railway sector.
The first part of the meeting addressed statutory matters. After approval of the 2023 accounts and the 2025 budget, the assembly confirmed the new timescale for the distribution of the reserve fund surplus.
The CIT General Assembly re-elected Luca Arnold (SBB/CFF/FFS) as a member of the Executive Committee.
Oliver Hirschfeld (DB) was also re-elected as Chair of the CIV Working Group.
After members’ endorsement of the statutory matters, CIT Secretary-General Gilles Mugnier reported on the main events and meetings held in 2024. Since the last General Assembly, CIT had organised sessions for six working groups, five expert groups, thee committees, as well as two conferences and two seminars, thus offering members various meetings each month while also covering all ongoing CIT business. In addition, training sessions for members had also been held online or on-site.
As at each assembly, the following part of the meeting was devoted to a detailed presentation of ongoing CIT work in the fields of passenger traffic, freight traffic, wagon law, waste transport and use of rail infrastructure.
Among other events, the Data Protection Conference will be held in June 2025.
Two new legal norms were presented in more depth: the Convention on the Contract for International Carriage of Goods by Rail (Unified Railway Law) and the Luxembourg Rail Protocol to the Cape Town Convention. Detailed presentations of these norms are regularly released in CIT-News.
In the final part, the current OTIF Secretary-General Wolfgang Küpper presented his achievements and hopes for OTIF-CIT cooperation by video message. Mr Küpper will end his mandate at the end of December 2024.
Aleksandr Kuzmenko, future OTIF Secretary-General from 2025 was also invited to attend the assembly and then described his vision and priorities for his upcoming mandate.
Maria Sack and Maria Urbanska then shared the closing address.
The next CIT General Assembly will be held in Bern on 20 November 2025.