What OEI is and how it works

One article, and one signature

The statutes in force were signed at Panama City on 2 December 1985 and took effect the same day, by their own final article. Article 4 is the whole of the entry test: members are the Ibero-American states whose governments ask to join, accept incorporation, and sign the Acta de Protocolización de los Estatutos. No accession treaty is required, no ratification threshold, no waiting period, and no vote of the sitting members appears in the text at all. Colombia signed that act and then ratified at home by Ley 28 of 17 October 1960, which is the shape the process takes: a signature at the organisation, a domestic instrument afterwards.

Article 1 says what the body is and what it used to be called. It is an international organisation of governmental character for cooperation among Ibero-American countries in education, science, technology and culture, formerly the Oficina de Educación Iberoamericana, and its official languages are Spanish and Portuguese.

The word doing the work in Article 4 is Ibero-American, and the statutes never define it.

From a bureau to an organisation

The bureau was created in Madrid in 1949, out of the first Ibero-American Congress of Education held there. The second congress, at Quito in 1954, turned it into an intergovernmental organisation with a permanent seat at Madrid. The third, at Santo Domingo in 1957, approved the statutes that governed it until the Panama City text replaced them. Science, technology and culture join education in the name and in Article 1 at that 1985 revision, and the organisation acquired the initials it now uses.

Who decides what

Article 6 sets out a legislative organ, the General Assembly; two delegated organs, the Directive Council and the General Secretariat; and a consultative one, the Ibero-American Conferences.

The Assembly meets in ordinary session every four years, in the country the previous Assembly named for it. No delegation may seat more than five representatives, and each delegation has one vote. Governments, associated entities and international bodies invited as observers may send two delegates, who speak and do not vote. Amending the statutes takes two thirds of the Assembly; the programme of activities and the budget pass by simple majority.

Between assemblies the Directive Council governs, composed of the ministers of education of the member states or their representatives, and chaired by the education minister of the country where the next ordinary Assembly falls. The Secretary General is elected by the Assembly by absolute majority and stays in office until the next ordinary session, renewable once. Article 13 requires the Secretary General and any deputy to hold the nationality of different member states.

Article 18 funds the work from obligatory annual quotas paid by the members, with voluntary contributions, donations, the sale of publications and fees for technical services beside them. Article 22 keeps a place at the Directive Council for the Instituto de Cooperación Iberoamericana, which may speak there and may not vote, in its quality as founding body. A statement introducing the organisation to the United Nations Sixth Committee in October 2023 put its national offices in 19 of the member countries.

Two official languages, and the ones the members record

Article 2 commits the organisation to spreading Spanish and Portuguese and to improving how they are taught, and in the same clause to bilingual education that preserves identities expressed in the plurilingualism of the region. The member records show what that clause is for.

Bolivia's lists Aymara, Guarani, Quechua and Spanish. Peru's lists Aymara, Quechua and Spanish, Paraguay's Guarani and Spanish, Ecuador's Northern Quichua, Shuar and Spanish, Mexico's Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya and Spanish, and Venezuela's Spanish and Venezuelan Sign Language. Equatorial Guinea's lists Spanish, French and Portuguese. Andorra's lists Catalan and nothing else. Uruguay's lists no official language at all, none being fixed in law there.

What membership does not touch

Nothing in the statutes concerns tariffs, borders, currency or defence, and the roster shows it. The same members sit in Mercosur, in the Andean Community, in the Central American Integration System, in the European Union and its single currency, and in the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, arrangements that could not all be held at once by a body that asked anything about trade. This one asks about none of it. What a member owes is a signature and an annual quota.

The United Nations General Assembly granted the organisation observer status by resolution 78/117, adopted without a vote on 7 December 2023. The draft had been introduced in the Sixth Committee on behalf of twenty co-sponsors.

Where the edge is argued

Two members sit outside any reading of Ibero-American that a map or a language law would produce on its own.

Andorra lies in the Pyrenees with Spain on one side and France on the other, and Catalan is its one official language, in an organisation whose own languages are Spanish and Portuguese. Equatorial Guinea is in Central Africa, bordered by Cameroon and Gabon; it was administered from Madrid until independence on 12 October 1968, its record lists Spanish among three official languages, and it belongs to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries as well.

Article 4 hands that question to the governments that sign, and this catalogue records the membership rather than the reading behind it. Beside the members the organisation keeps observers, among them Portuguese-speaking states in Africa and in Asia that are not on the roster here. An observer speaks at the Assembly and does not vote, which Article 7 states plainly, and it is not membership.