After the Special Commission meeting in 1996, the Hague Judgments Project was officially added to the agenda of the Hague Conference during its Eighteenth Session. In project management terms, and according to previous Hague Conference practice, the Hague Judgments Project now entered the ‘implementation phase’, i.e., the phase in which the drafting of a convention text began during further Special Commission meetings set up for this purpose. For this phase, which lasted from June 1997 – October 1999, in total five further Special Commission meetings took place: in June 1997, March 1998, November 1998, June 1999 and October 1999 (originally, only four Special Commission meetings were scheduled). The draft convention text created by those Special Commission meetings was meant to serve as the basis for official negotiations between the Hague Conference Member States during the Nineteenth Diplomatic Session, which originally was scheduled to take place in the year 2000.

In theory, during this ‘implementation phase’, the plan to develop a judgments convention should have been executed. To recall, the general concept that had been developed during the Special Commission meetings in 1994 and 1996 consisted of pursuing the creation of a strict double convention as a first priority (but without having abandoned the mixed convention concept completely). However, an important project management step in the creation of a plan for developing a global judgments convention had been missed. According to good project management practice and previous usages of the Permanent Bureau, the general concept for creating a Hague Judgments Convention that had been developed and incidentally approved by the Hague Conference Member States during the Eighteenth Session should have been developed further in a ‘definition phase’ of the project.