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At the end of the First World War the defeated states were stripped of their colonies and imperial territories. But, in a departure from previous practice, the victorious powers did not feel able straightforwardly to annex those of them whose peoples were, in the words of the Covenant of the League of Nations, ‘not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world’. Their well-being was stated to be ‘a sacred trust of civilization’, and was to be placed in the hands of certain ‘advanced’ (and victorious) states who would govern on the basis of a mandate formally granted by the Council of the League, but in the drafting of which the prospective mandatory had a large hand.
The mandatories were obliged to report annually to the League, which established the Permanent Mandates Commission to examine the reports on its behalf and advise it on the execution of the mandates. The Commission was composed of independent experts, with nationals of non-mandatories in the majority. It was not, however, a very intrusive form of international supervision, and one well-placed observer (Salvador de Madariaga, a former member of the League\'s Secretariat) said of the system that ‘the old hag of colonialism puts on a fig leaf and calls herself mandate’.
By the time the League was wound up in 1946 a few mandates had become sovereign states. Those that remained were transferred to the UN trusteeship system, other than South West Africa, as South Africa (the mandatory power) would not agree to this. |
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