What Arab League is and how it works

The clause that admits a member

Article 1 of the pact composes the League of the independent Arab States that signed it, and gives every other independent Arab State the right to adhere: an application filed with the permanent General Secretariat, put to the Council at its first meeting after the application arrives. The text sets no further test. It does not define an Arab state, does not count speakers, and does not say where an applicant has to sit. Arabic is an official language of every member state, and in seven of the records filed here it shares that standing with another language: Berber in Algeria, Tamazight in Morocco, Kurdish in Iraq, Somali in Somalia, Comorian and French in the Comoros, French in Djibouti, English in Sudan.

March 1945, and the accessions after it

Six governments signed at Cairo on 22 March 1945, and Yemen signed on 5 May. Article 20 made the pact binding fifteen days after the General Secretariat had received four instruments of ratification, and the four deposited that April, by Transjordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq, brought it into force for them on 10 May 1945. Libya adhered on 28 March 1953. The member records here carry the accessions that followed, from Sudan in 1956 to the Comoros on 20 November 1993. One entry on this page has no accession date on its record at all, and it came in by another route.

What a vote binds

Each state has one vote on the Council, whatever the size of its delegation. Article 7 makes a decision taken unanimously binding on every member state, and a decision reached by majority binding only on the states that accept it. Article 8 has each member respect the form of government obtaining in the others and undertake no action tending to change it, on a roster whose records run from absolute monarchy to federal republic. Withdrawal takes a year's notice under Article 18, and the same article lets the Council treat a member that is not fulfilling the pact as excluded, by the unanimous vote of every other state.

The seat, and the years it moved

Article 10 makes Cairo the permanent seat and lets the Council meet wherever it designates. The seat itself has moved once. After Egypt signed a peace treaty with Israel on 26 March 1979 the other members voted to suspend Egypt's membership and to transfer the headquarters to Tunis; Egypt was reinstated in 1989 and the headquarters returned to Cairo in 1990. Two more suspensions came in 2011: Libya in February, reinstated that August, and Syria in November, reinstated in 2023.

The member with no accession date

An annex to the pact deals with Palestine, and it was written when there was no government there to sign anything. It records the signatories' position that Palestine had been separated from the Ottoman Empire along with the other Arab states and that its independence could no longer be questioned in law, and it asks the Council to designate an Arab delegate from Palestine to take part in the League's work until the country enjoys actual independence. Observer status went to the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964 and became full membership in 1976. Palestine is the entry on this page whose record shows no seat at the United Nations, and the three currencies its record lists as in use there are all issued by other governments.

What the members signed afterwards

An agreement on joint defence and economic co-operation was signed on 13 April 1950, committing its signatories to coordinate military defence measures. The Arab Charter on Human Rights was adopted on 22 May 2004 and entered into force on 15 March 2008. It establishes an Arab Human Rights Committee of seven members, elected by secret ballot by the states parties, sitting in a personal capacity, with no more than one national of any one state on it. Like the pact itself, the Charter binds the states that are party to it.

What runs inside the group, and beside it

Ten members sit in Africa and belong to the African Union as well; twelve sit in Asia. Smaller rosters run inside this one: the six states of the Gulf Cooperation Council are all filed here, and so are the five of the Arab Maghreb Union. Every member also belongs to the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation and to the Group of 77, both of which are wider than this group.

Where the edge is argued

What is not settled is the word Arab. Mauritania joined in 1973, Somalia in 1974, Djibouti in 1977 and the Comoros in 1993, and Arabic is an official language of each of them. That standing is the marker the group is usually described by, and the pact does not name it: Article 1 asks for an independent Arab State and stops there. Whether the roster describes a shared language, a shared history or an affiliation a government chooses is a question the founding text leaves open. The catalogue files the membership its records carry and leaves the question where the pact left it.