The Ice Curtain: How Antarctica’s 29 governments broke their own transparency rule

For 64 years, the Antarctic Treaty has promised international cooperation “in the interest of all mankind”. Yet, treaty governments have ignored their own transparency rule, keeping the public locked out of decisions shaping the planet’s future.

Since 1961, the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meeting (ATCM) — a roving assembly of 29 states that governs nearly 10% of Earth — has never opened its talks. These 10-day sessions grapple with hard problems such as the fate of emperor penguins, ice sheets that could ultimately raise sea levels by 60m and potential flashpoints between great polar powers.

Access is limited to about 500 diplomats, scientists, tourism officials and one conservation watchdog. Meeting minutes are censored. Consensus blockers like “China” and “Russia” vanish into phrases like “some parties”.

The silence may be starting to crack. In new minutes from June’s Milan ATCM, the Netherlands — backed by Australia and South Korea — has proposed press briefings, broad NGO access and publishing discussion documents ahead of meetings. 

Hosting the first truly transparent meeting would be historic. The Netherlands, set to stage the landmark 50th ATCM in 2028, ranks among the world’s press-freedom leaders.

But while governments talk up transparency, Daily Maverick has pried open the ATCM’s black box. From Canberra to Paris, Berlin to Helsinki, and Kochi to Milan, we tracked every closed meeting, sifted six decades of records and pressed ministries from Pretoria to Tokyo. The result? Contrary to its own rules of procedure, the treaty’s only public session has been quietly and persistently shuttered — and shows little sign of opening.

It is an unwritten law of the Ice Curtain: sunlight must not touch the ice.

The ‘spotlight session’

It is the moment when the public and press can sit in the room and see Antarctic power politics laid bare.

By its own rule, every ATCM has to begin with an “opening plenary session” held in public. It is the single exception to an otherwise tightly closed summit, said Howard Varney, a practising advocate and international justice expert.

“Rule 8 requires all of the opening plenary sessions to be held in public,” stressed Varney, noting that it is enshrined in the ATCM’s rule book, officially known as the “rules of procedure”.

The annual minutes of recent years show why this session is crucial. Think of it as the “spotlight session” — a high-stakes stage where scientific warnings clash with rising tourist pressures. The treaty’s Committee for Environmental Protection tables its findings. China and Russia keep using this session to block Canada’s membership bids. Ukraine and a number of Western states have blocked Belarus’ application. It is a recurring tug of war that exposes the raw power dynamics in a fragile wilderness.

Rule 8 — the spotlight rule — is explicit: “The opening plenary session shall be held in public; other sessions shall be held in private, unless the meeting shall determine otherwise.” 

To dim or switch off the light, two-thirds of the treaty’s decision-maker states must vote in favour of it, Varney emphasised. Today, that is a non-trivial 20 of 29 Antarctic states with full decision-making rights. 

Paris to Milan: A runway of faux transparency

We have tracked each meeting in real time since 2021. Our five-year investigation reveals a troubling trend. 

The host state appears to take control of the switch to the spotlight session and restricts public access to just one of about six agenda items running over two or three hours. 

Formally, that first agenda item is called the “opening of the meeting”. 

Decoded, this is basically just the brief “opening ceremony” — the most politically harmless among all agenda items. Out of a full spotlight session, this ceremony is mostly limited to a 30-minute sliver of the usual diplomatic pomp and pageantry seen at the start of all intergovernmental meetings. 

Anything potentially sensitive — what is hidden from live public view — only rolls out after agenda item one.

Spotlight session incident records: 2021-2025

2021 — Paris, France 

• Scheduled spotlight session: Two hours.
• What could you catch? The opening ceremony — 

minutes. (Streamed due to Covid restrictions.)

Response rating: 5/5 stars. The host state promptly replied to several queries before the session.

The zinger? “As you might know already from last year, the meeting is not public except for the specific segment of its official opening ceremony,” host committee deputy head Patrick Mousnier-Lompré conceded.

2022 — Berlin, Germany 

• Scheduled spotlight session: Three hours.
• What could you catch? Nichts. Not even one agenda item for the price of six.
• Response rating: 2/5 stars. Six unanswered emails over two weeks before the session. The foreign ministry eventually agreed to an interview with the German delegation head.
• The zinger? “The opening ceremony was not open for any member of the press,” ministry spokesperson Marco Gogolin replied at 3.29pm on Tuesday, 24 May — 3.5 hours after the session had been set to end.

2023 — Helsinki, Finland 

• Scheduled spotlight session: Three hours.
• What could you catch? The opening ceremony — 25 minutes (in-person).
• Response rating: 5/5 stars. The host committee was consistently responsive over several months.
• Enforcement: As agreed, a loudspeaker politely ordered the only journalist present — this reporter — to leave the hall at 9.25am on Tuesday, 30 May. As the reporter packed up in front of 500 delegates, silence fell like an icicle.
• The zinger? “It’s really hard for the broader public to know these meetings are even going on,” said keynote speaker and climate youth activist Helena Gualinga. “Media are failing to inform the broader public.”

2024 — Kochi, India 

• Scheduled spotlight session: Two and a half hours.
• What could you catch? The opening ceremony — 

minutes (in-person and streamed).

Put simply: As only a single agenda item out of about six in the opening plenary session, the brief opening ceremony cannot be confused with the full parent session. 

The spotlight is meant to burn over the entire parent session — defined as multiple items in the annual agenda — for up to three hours. 

But this diplomatic trick works, because the opening ceremony and the opening plenary session sound like they must surely be the same thing. After all, they share the word “opening”. So, what should be hours of public scrutiny is reduced to a half hour of pageantry — and passed off as compliance.

As a rare member of the public or journalist to have touched the hem of the spotlight session’s garment, you would have seen a diplomatic teaser trailer for a show you could not watch. 

Schrödinger’s cat and the garden paparazza

ATCM 2025, hosted in the Italian fashion capital from 24 June to 3 July, strutted on to the Milan diplomatic runway like a phantom couture show — and left a lone photojournalist stranded behind velvet ropes. 

Milan’s spotlight session was scheduled for two and a half hours, but Italy’s foreign ministry offered the public nothing. Niente.

Ten months into our campaign to reach the ministry, its events organiser, the Triumph Group, sent us a cryptic response. Giulia Meschini said: “We are now considering the issue of possible press participation also in the light of security and budgetary considerations. A decision will be made shortly before the event.” Further queries received no response.

Host head Orazio Guanciale responded once — with an auto-reply seemingly crafted by Schrödinger’s cat on a typewriter. The foreign ministry official, we learnt on 18 June, was destined to return on 19 May as well as 7 July — a temporal anomaly that would presumably collapse once someone actually caught sight of him at his desk.

“I was accompanied by a member of staff — who kept a close eye on me,” said the Italian photojournalist Lucia Sala Simion, who reported being the sole press to make it into the half-hour opening ceremony. At 10.30am, the specialist reporter — a participant in about 10 Antarctic expeditions with the Italian and French programmes — “was escorted out” like a celebrity paparazza.

“In the next few days, I would no longer be allowed inside the venue, not even the lounge,” said the photojournalist. “I’ll be staying outside in the garden, like a homeless person.”

So, the spotlight switch seems to be outsourced to the political whims and shifting press freedoms of whichever country hosts the meeting, leaving the light vulnerable to being dimmed, or snuffed out, at will. 

According to Reporters Without Borders’ 2025 index, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s ruling coalition has the lowest press freedom record among Western Europe’s Antarctic decision-maker states.

Who flicks the switch? 

South Africa’s environmental ministry told us that, “in terms of most recent history, the opening plenary was never fully open and that has been the case for most of the history of the treaty”.

So, if the spotlight session has never been fully open and it takes at least two-thirds of decision-maker states to flick the switch, where is the paper trail? 

We asked Antarctic Treaty executive secretary Albert Lluberas, based at the secretariat’s office in downtown Buenos Aires. 

Lluberas replied that “the secretariat’s records are limited to the final reports” — the meeting minutes. We combed all public minutes since 1961 — and came up empty.

We pressed on. Acting as a source of persistent misinformation, why did diplomats appear to distort the most elementary rules of the spotlight session? What had the secretariat advised them? 

The executive secretary was evasive. As “a small administrative unit”, the secretariat was just an “organ” of the meeting. It had no powers “to dictate the policies and organisation of the ATCM for each state party, including their press outreach and management, which are at their sole discretion”. 

And yet Japan, host of ATCM 2026 in Hiroshima, said it was counting on the secretariat to help it host a legally sound meeting. It was also planning press conferences.

“We will prepare for the meeting in close consultation with the secretariat,” the ministry told us, “and in accordance with its guidance.”

Erroneously claiming that access to the spotlight session was “determined through consensus”, it seemed doubtful the ministry understood the rule. Or that the secretariat, the ATCM’s only permanent adviser, was about to disabuse it. 

‘Few have the institutional memory’ 

With China, Russia and the US at the decision-making table, the Dutch-led transparency proposal is ambitious but carefully designed. It stops short of calling for all sessions to be public. Its “phased” transparency approach — a three-year trial hoping to “codify” changes into rules — may indeed be the most realistic path to progress.

The proposal is deeply researched and cites the spotlight rule, yet it fails to acknowledge that most of the spotlight session’s agenda items unfold behind the Ice Curtain.  

Responding to questions, the Dutch foreign ministry was refreshingly candid.

“Diplomats are mostly on three-, four- or five-year assignments and we then move on to other positions. Only very few have the institutional memory to tell you what happened at the opening ceremony 10 or 20 years ago,” the ministry said. “If this has not been reflected in the final reports of those meetings it will be difficult to trace exactly if and how the meetings arrived at such ‘determinations’.” 

South Korea, which hosts the 2027 meeting, expressed its support, but deferred to the Netherlands’ “milestone” leadership.

“Australia has long been a champion of transparency in the multilateral system as a key accountability and confidence-building measure, including in the context of the Antarctic Treaty System,” said Canberra, who hosted the first ATCM in 1961. “We encourage all parties to support steps to enhance transparency, communication and stakeholder engagement.”

Neither Canberra nor Seoul responded to whether they would publicly reaffirm the spirit and the letter of the opening plenary and the switch that controls access to it. 

To that question, the Netherlands said we should ask Japan, from which we received no response. 

South Africa’s top negotiator Ashley Johnson used his Milan microphone to back the transparency push as Africa’s only decision-maker state. Pledging a historic local press conference ahead of the Hiroshima meeting, he told us diplomatic sensitivities would still require some closed sessions. Openness had to be “measured”.

Others, like the Antarctic and Southern Ocean Coalition, also cautioned against full openness. Claire Christian, head of the treaty’s only conservation watchdog, said closed doors “can be useful for facilitating open discussion and exchange of ideas”. Christian may be right, but not even internal “openness” has broken China and Russia’s annual vetoes of plans to protect emperor penguins and proclaim marine protected areas.

“Other international organisations have implemented various practices to promote transparency without compromising their effectiveness,” Christian conceded.

‘Chaos and arbitrariness’

Klaus Dodds, honorary professor at Royal Holloway, University of London, said the treaty’s 12 original decision-maker states deliberately limited publicity for fear of press scrutiny. Though South Africa’s post-1994 democracy is today first in Africa for press freedom, the treaty’s founding club featured two of the Cold War era’s most repressive information gatekeepers: the apartheid regime and the Soviet Union. 

“In June 1958, the decision was taken that there should be a minimum of publicity given to the talks and their contents,” the polar geopolitician noted. “Meeting documents were reclassified and as far as I understand it then classified as ‘secret’ rather than say ‘confidential’.” 

Varney, also a transitional justice specialist, has spent decades exposing systemic opacity. Currently suing South Africa’s president, justice and police ministers, commissioner of police and National Director of Public Prosecutions for alleged political interference in the prosecutions of apartheid-era crimes, he said Rule 8 — the spotlight rule — was “procedurally binding” within the ATCM. 

“The alternative is chaos and arbitrariness,” he said. 

He added: “Repeated closures run contrary to the founding principles of the treaty’s preamble.” 

The 1961 agenda established the opening ceremony as but one item. By this count, the ATCM may have breached its own rules of procedure repeatedly. Potential violations include: 

1. Shutting the public out of most of every opening plenary for 64 years.
2. Laundering one of about six agenda items — the opening ceremony — as the full opening plenary.
3. Handing control to host states to decide who sees what.
4. Failing to produce the two-thirds vote needed for lawful closure. Neither the 2004-created secretariat — keeper of records dating to 1959 — nor five contacted states offered evidence.
5. Failing to commit to a reaffirmation of the spirit and the letter of the opening plenary.
6. Claiming transparency through 64 years of redacted final reports — 200-page “public” documents issued weeks to months after each meeting.
7. Turning a blind eye to rotating host states who misinterpret and publicly misstate the rules.
8. Blocking or restricting media access.
9. Admitting only two journalists across four years of meetings — Paris, Berlin, Helsinki and Milan.
10. Blocking access to all but the first agenda item, India ushered in domestic journalists whose favourable coverage aligned with the Modi-era’s media buyouts and low press freedom ranking.

Professor Alan Hemmings of the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, explained the discrepancy bluntly: the legal requirement existed, but host states wielded outsized practical control. Historical inertia had hardened secrecy into policy, said the Antarctic governance specialist.

“This state of affairs appears to cause no concern or embarrassment to Antarctic officials or parties,” said Hemmings.

Professor Nicholas King, a UN science adviser, agreed: “The global community needs to come together through the UN to force changes to a fully open, multilateral Antarctic oversight treaty which negotiates transparently and undertakes decisions in the best interest of the planet and all peoples, in line with the objectives of the UN Charter.”

‘They offered the two-thirds in concrete’ 

But the resistance continues. When the Netherlands braved the Milan floor with its far-reaching transparency vision, the preliminary minutes show that “many parties” feared the “unintended impact of increased publicity”. 

While “many” emperors seemed worried about being seen to emerge in public without any clothes, a 2023 British Antarctic Survey study shows the real emperors — 10,000 penguin chicks — had died after catastrophic sea-ice collapse.

“Some parties also observed that the current rules of procedure already ensure transparency,” the minutes added.

And this is as close as public/media get to what's going on behind the Ice Curtain. Antarctic Treaty meetings are still shuttered. Meanwhile right now UNESCO World Heritage Committee is lives streaming sessions. After 60 years in hiding what's @AntarcticTreaty still afraid of? https://t.co/kuT4jR0XQJ

— Andrew Darby (@looksouth) July 5, 2019

Retired Sydney Morning Herald reporter Andrew Darby, who covered Antarctic affairs from 1983 to 2015, told us consensus was the mantra of the “Ice Curtain” — a term he coined on his X account. 

“In reply, one must say that the evidence of our eyes is that the drafters of the treaty didn’t think that would always be the case when it came to running the meetings. They offered the two-thirds in concrete,” Darby said. His 2007 book, Harpoon, exposed Japanese whale-hunting in Antarctica.

The Dutch-led reformers have vowed to continue their campaign. It is a battle for the ages. If it prevails, the public may finally witness one of the planet’s most consequential diplomatic stages. 

Until then, the Long Dark Night reigns over the meeting. And the ice holds its secrets like a silent siren. DM

Tiara Walters is a Daily Maverick reporter. Walters’ travel to Helsinki was made possible, in part, by the support of the Friedrich Naumann Foundation and the Finnish Embassy of South Africa.

The transparency proposal by the Netherlands, Australia and South Korea. (Source: ATCM meeting documents database)