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Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group
The Commonwealth Ministerial Action Group (CMAG) is a group of nine Foreign Ministers that meets when necessary to examine serious and persistent threats to democracy in Commonwealth countries. CMAG was created at the 1995 Auckland Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM), as the principal outcome of a Canadian initiative to give the Commonwealth a high-level inter-governmental mechanism to respond to serious violations of the “Harare Declaration” of 1991 which set out the Commonwealth's commitment to CMAG is carried out confidentially, in keeping with the Commonwealth's quiet diplomacy approach.
The CMAG membership is reconstituted every two years at the CHOGM. Canada rotated off of CMAG at the 2007 Kampala CHOGM after a four-year term, and was also a member from 1995 to 2002. Following the 2009 Port of Spain CHOGM, CMAG is currently comprised of Ministers from: Australia, Bangladesh, Ghana, Jamaica, Maldives, Namibia, New Zealand, Vanuatu and Trinidad and Tobago.
Fiji, which was suspended from the Councils of the Commonwealth in December 2006, is the only country on CMAG's current formal agenda, but situations in other countries are discussed informally.
CMAG decided on July 31, 2009 that if the Fiji Interim Government did not commit to a genuine political dialogue with key political stakeholders, leading to credible elections by October 2010, that it would be automatically suspended from the Commonwealth effective September 1, 2009. Noting that Fiji had failed to meet these terms in the allotted time period, the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth announced the full suspension of Fiji from the Commonwealth on September 1, 2009.
