The Empire Parliamentary Association was founded at a meeting on 18 July 1911 in what was then House of Commons Committee Room 15 in the Palace of Westminster. As well as Members of the UK Parliament, the meeting was attended by representatives of the then dominion Parliaments of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa. In 1924, the first conference was held outside London, with representatives spending two months in southern Africa, starting in Maseru in what is now Lesotho before moving across South Africa. Conferences followed in Australia and Canada, although London remained as the favored destination.
The Commonwealth Parliamentary Association (CPA) emerged from the Empire Parliamentary Association at a conference in London in October 1948, as Parliamentarians preceded their governments by several months in recognizing the future lay in working together as equals cooperating to build a new world. The Commonwealth was not to be born officially at the government level until 1949.
CPA Conferences, later known as the Commonwealth Parliamentary Conference (CPC), became annual from 1961, having previously been held every two years, adding discussions on parliamentary and electoral processes to the agenda of political issues, especially foreign policy.
