Relativity in the IERS Conventions

In the last years, a fully general relativistic definition of reference systems and of their application to astronomy and geodesy has been passed into Resolutions of the scientific unions, following work of several working groups and of the community at large. In this community, the role of the International Earth Rotation and Reference systems Service (IERS) is to generate the terrestrial and celestial reference systems and the transformation between them, and the IERS Conventions provide the set of models and procedures used in the generation of IERS products. It is therefore essential that the IAU framework for relativity is introduced in the IERS Conventions, and that this is done consistently and completely throughout the document. The paper reviews relativistic aspects in the IERS Conventions and presents recent and on-going work aiming at providing a complete and consistent presentation for a new reference edition of the IERS Conventions, expected to appear in the next year.