Eight Arctic States, six Indigenous Permanent Participants with full consultation, and military security left outside

Background

Cooperation across the far north runs through the Arctic Council, which was created in 1996. Its founding paper, the Ottawa Declaration of September 19, 1996, is a joint declaration rather than a treaty, and representatives of the eight Arctic States signed it. Those Member States are Canada, the Kingdom of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Norway, the United States and the Russian Federation. Six organisations of Arctic Indigenous Peoples hold a standing of their own as Permanent Participants, among them the Inuit Circumpolar Council, the Saami Council and the Aleut International Association, and that category exists so that Indigenous representatives are fully consulted inside the Council. Scientific and technical work is carried on in six Working Groups that meet through the year, and Ministers may set up Task Forces drawn from Working Group experts and Member State representatives for a limited spell. Observer status is open to non-Arctic states and to intergovernmental, inter-parliamentary and non-governmental organisations, and Observers may attend Working Group meetings and join particular projects. Every two years the chairmanship passes to another of the eight Member States, which then organises meetings, coordinates joint projects and speaks for the Council outside it, while Senior Arctic Officials, the SAOs, carry the work between ministerial meetings. The Council has no power to implement or enforce the guidelines, assessments and recommendations it issues, a job that falls to individual Arctic States or to international bodies, and its mandate, as the Ottawa Declaration puts it, leaves out military security. Even so, three legally binding agreements have been negotiated under its auspices and signed by the eight Arctic States: on aeronautical and maritime search and rescue, on marine oil pollution preparedness and response, and on enhancing international Arctic scientific cooperation.