Malta's prime minister Joseph Muscat said the format of Brexit negotiations would "be more or less like what happened with Greece", referring to bailout negotiations in 2015 that saw Athens forced to accept conditions it had sworn against.
China diplomats have been engaged in shuttle diplomacy around the region to nail down the format and the timing of the negotiations.
The first type of session is the plenary meeting during which all delegates discuss and decide the format of negotiations and vote on the presented text after extensive deliberation.
With little more than six months to go before Brexit, formally scheduled to take place on 29 March 2019, EU heads of state or government will meet to discuss (in an EU27 format) the state of play of the negotiations over the terms of the UK's withdrawal agreement.
"Although the exact format of the debates should be open to negotiations, we are determined to secure an agreement in principle as early as possible to prevent any party from securing narrow political advantage by wrecking talks or dragging their feet on a matter that should be an issue of cross-party consensus.
The changing format of UN climate negotiations makes this easier to achieve.
The nine months allotted by U.S. Secretary of State John F. Kerry for the current format of negotiations have yielded little agreement.
Any change to the format of the debates is likely to involve tortuous negotiations between the broadcasters, who took about six months of discussion to come up with the original three-debate plan published in October last year.
The format of the debate has been the subject of painstaking negotiations between the parties, campaigns and broadcasters, as the live event could have a powerful influence on the electorate in the run-up to the 23 June vote.
Lawrence Susskind, PON's Vice-Chair of Education, hypothesized that the format of negotiation teaching videos will be almost as important as the content.
The strategy is to narrow the focus of the negotiations to cover Aleppo only, and to broaden the format to include Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Turkey and, at times, Iran.
