TheUnited Nations Trusteeship Council is one of thesix principal organs of theUnited Nations, established to help ensure thattrust territories were administered in the best interests of their inhabitants and of international peace and security.
Provisions to form a new UN agency to oversee thedecolonization of dependent territories from colonial times were made at theSan Francisco Conference in 1945 and were included in Chapter 12 of theCharter of the United Nations. Those dependent territories (colonies andmandated territories) were to be placed under the international trusteeship system created by theUnited Nations Charter as a successor to theLeague of Nations mandate system. Ultimately, eleven territories were placed under trusteeship: seven in Africa and four inOceania. Ten of the trust territories had previously been League of Nations mandates; the eleventh wasItalian Somaliland.
In order to implement the provisions of the trusteeship system, theGeneral Assembly passed resolution 64 on 14 December 1946, establishing the United Nations Trusteeship Council. The Trusteeship Council held its first session in March 1947.
In March 1948 the United States proposed that the territory ofMandatory Palestine be placed under UN trusteeship with the termination of the British Mandate in May 1948 (seeAmerican trusteeship proposal for Palestine). However, the US did not make an effort to implement this proposal, which became moot with the declaration of the State ofIsrael.
Under the Charter, the Trusteeship Council was to consist of representatives of United Nations member states administering trust territories and an equal number of representatives of non-administering states. Thus, the Council was to consist of (1) all U.N. members administering trust territories, (2) the five permanent members of theSecurity Council, and (3) as many other non-administering members as needed to equalize the number of administering and non-administering members, elected by the General Assembly for renewable three-year terms. Over time, as trust territories attained independence, the size and workload of the Trusteeship Council was reduced. Ultimately, the Trusteeship Council came to include only the five permanent Security Council members (China, France, the Soviet Union/Russian Federation, the United Kingdom, and the United States), as the only country administering a Trust Territory (the United States) was a permanent member.
With the independence ofPalau, formerly part of theTrust Territory of the Pacific Islands, in 1994, there presently are no trust territories, leaving the Trusteeship Council without responsibilities. Since theNorthern Mariana Islands, which was a part of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, became acommonwealth of the USA in 1986, it is technically the only area not to have 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.
Its mission fulfilled, the Trusteeship Council suspended its operation on 1 November 1994, and, although under theUnited Nations Charter it continues to exist on paper, its future role and even existence remains uncertain. The Trusteeship Council has a president and vice-president,[2] although the sole current duty of these officers is to meet with the heads of other UN agencies on occasion. According to the United Nations website:
By a resolution adopted on 25th of May 1994, the Council amended its rules of procedure to drop the obligation to meet annually and agreed to meet as occasion required -- by its decision or the decision of its President, or at the request of a majority of its members or the General Assembly or the Security Council.[3]
The chamber itself is still used for other purposes. Following a three-year refurbishment, restoring its original design by Danish architectFinn Juhl, the chamber was re-opened in 2013.[4] The current president of the Trusteeship Council is James Kariuki and the Vice-President is Nathalie Broadhurst Estival.[5]
The formal elimination of the Trusteeship Council would require the revision of theUnited Nations Charter. Though this has been proposed as part ofreform of the United Nations,[6] the political difficulties of such changes mean that these have not been enacted. Other functions for the Trusteeship Council have been considered, such as theCommission on Global Governance's 1995Our Global Neighbourhood report which recommended expanding the trusteeship council's remit to the protection ofenvironmental integrity and theglobal commons on the two-thirds of the world's surface that is outside national jurisdictions.[7][8]
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