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United Nations Trusteeship Council
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HistoryThe Trusteeship Council was formed in 1945 to oversee the decolonization of those dependent territories that were to be placed under the international trusteeship system created by the United Nations Charter as a successor to the League of Nations mandate system. Ultimately, eleven territories were placed under trusteeship: seven in Africa and four in Oceania. Ten of the trust territories had previously been League of Nations mandates; the eleventh was Italian Somaliland.
Under the Charter, the Trusteeship Council was to consist of an equal number of United Nations Member States administering trust territories and non-administering states. Thus, the Council was to consist of (1) all U.N. members administering trust territories, (2) the five permanent members of the Security Council, and (3) as many other non-administering members as needed to equalize the number of administering and non-administering members, elected by the United Nations General Assembly for renewable three-year terms. Over time, as trust territories attained independence, the size and workload of the Trusteeship Council was reduced and ultimately came to include only the five permanent Security Council members (China, France, the Soviet Union/Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States).
With the independence of Palau, formerly part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, in 1994, there presently are no trust territories, leaving the Trusteeship Council without responsibilities. (Since the Northern Mariana Islands was a part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands and became a commonwealth of the USA in 1986, it is technically the only area to have not joined as a part of another state or gained full independence as a sovereign nation.)
The Trusteeship Council was not assigned responsibility for colonial territories outside the trusteeship system, although the Charter did establish the principle that member states were to administer such territories in conformity with the best interests of their inhabitants.
Present statusIts mission fulfilled, the Trusteeship Council suspended its operation on 1 November 1994, and although under the United Nations Charter it continues to exist on paper, its future role and even existence remains uncertain. The Trusteeship Council is currently headed by Michel Duclos, with Adam Thomson as vice-president , although the sole current duty of these officers is to meet with the heads of other UN agencies on occasion. Initially they met annually, but according to a UN press release from their session in 2004:
The Council amended its rules of procedure to drop the obligation to meet annually and agreed to meet as the occasion required. It now meets by its own decision, the decision of its President, at a request from a majority of its members, or at a request from the General Assembly or Security Council.
Future prospectsThe formal elimination of the Trusteeship Council would require the revision of the UN Charter.
The Commission on Global Governance's 1996 report Our Global Neighborhood recommended amending Chapters 12 and 13 of the United Nations Charter to give the Trusteeship Council authority over the global commons, which consists of oceans, the atmosphere, outer space, and Antarctica . The World Federalist Association issued an action alert calling for members to lobby the Government in support of this reform. Their theory is that an international regulatory body is needed to protect environmental integrity on the two-thirds of the world’s surface that is outside national jurisdictions .
In March 2005, however, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan proposed a sweeping reform of the United Nations, including an expansion of the Security Council. As this restructuring would involve significant changes to the UN charter, Annan proposed the complete elimination of the Trusteeship Council as part of these reforms .
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