The UIC Latin American team welcomed La Junta de Seguridad en el Transporte (the Board of Transport Safety, JST) as a new member of the Region, during an online meeting held on 20 January 2023.
La Junta was created as an autonomous economic-financial entity in 2020 in light of the Republic of Argentina declaring its transport safety policy to be of national public interest. Therefore, JST’s mission is to promote transport safety through investigating accidents and incidents in the Argentine transport systems.
The UIC team was represented by José Villafañe, President of the UIC Latin American Region, Marc Guigon, Passenger Director and Coordinator of the Latin American Region, Vanessa Pérez Miranda, Senior Advisor of the Passenger Department and the LARA Region, with the addition of Nicedolly Taborda who joined the team as the Representative of the UIC Latin American Region, and whose role, among other things, will be to support activity in the region and to establish links with the different UIC departments at the HQ in Paris and with the members.
Julian Obaid, Chair of the Board of Transport Safety, Diego Di Siervi, National Director of Railway Incident Investigation, and Florencia Cerutti, International Coordination, were present on behalf of JST.
At the meeting, the UIC team officially welcomed JST as a UIC member and highlighted the importance of the two bodies working together. It was a good opportunity to explain how UIC functions as a global association with the aim of engendering cooperation between the main stakeholders of the international railway sector, including JST, of course.
Obaid explained that JST’s interest in becoming a member of the UIC came from the desire to participate in the creation of a large collaborative network and to access important information, as UIC is a global forum for sharing experiences and searching for solutions that provide greater harmonisation between multimodal systems. He also expressed that this collaboration would empower JST by enabling them to evolve into a reference and information repository for safety in region’s rail transport.
For UIC, Villafañe emphasised the importance of JST pioneering actions related to safe transport (for all systems), since other organisations in the region would begin to join in order to replicate JST’s management model, and this would lead to the creation of a regional round table on rail transport safety in the investigation and prevention of accidents.
