On Dec. 18, in Geneva, the foreign ministers of Russia, Turkey and Iran presented their list of proposed members of the Syrian Constitutional Committee to UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura. The Astana trio had worked on the list for about a year but had not officially presented it. Yet neither the special envoy nor the UN secretary-general were able to confirm whether they were ready to approve the Astana trio's list.

The decision to form a Syrian Constitutional Committee was made in late January, during the Syrian National Dialogue Congress in Sochi. The same congress also decided that the Constitutional Committee would operate on a proportional system. This means that the government, the opposition and civil society will each have 50 delegates. The initial lists of members were prepared by late July and were approved by the Astana nations. Yet de Mistura's list became a problem, as Damascus and Tehran found his suggested candidates unacceptable. The Astana trio thus decided to propose its own list to the UN secretary-general.

On Dec. 18, Foreign Ministers Sergey Lavrov, Mevlut Cavusoglu and Mohammad Javad Zarif arrived in Geneva in a rather good mood. All signs indicated that the efforts to form the committee were coming to a successful end. At the beginning of the summit, Zarif announced that the controversial list of civil society delegates had finally been approved by the president of Russia’s special envoy Alexander Lavrentiev, Turkish Deputy Foreign Minister Sedat Onal and the Iranian foreign minister’s assistant Hossein Jaberi Ansari. The only remaining step was to hand the list to the UN. However, the talks stretched on for six hours, including the lunch break.

It's now clear that, several hours into the meeting, the process had gone awry. Instead of a press conference, only a final statement was to be issued, and the contents of that statement were debated until the last minute. Meanwhile, the pool of UN reporters expressed surprise that, for the first time, de Mistura's office had not warned them that the Astana trio was to meet in Geneva. Up until the last moment, the officials had mentioned nothing more than a “high-level meeting.”