48 Facts About League Council

The first meeting of the Council of the League took place on 16 January 1920, and the first meeting of Assembly of the League took place on 15 November 1920.

Diplomatic philosophy behind the League Council represented a fundamental shift from the preceding hundred years.

The League lacked its own armed force and depended on the victorious First World War Allies to enforce its resolutions, keep to its economic sanctions, or provide an army when needed.

The onset of the Second World War in 1939 showed that the League Council had failed its primary purpose; it was inactive until its abolition.

The League Council lasted for 26 years; the United Nations replaced it in 1946 and inherited several agencies and organisations founded by the League Council.

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League Council proposed the creation of a mandate system for captured colonies of the Central Powers during the war.

League Council argued for a large and permanent secretariat to carry out the League's administrative duties.

The Executive League Council would create a Permanent Court of International Justice to make judgements on the disputes.

On 1 November 1920, the headquarters of the League Council was moved from London to Geneva, where the first General Assembly was held on 15 November 1920.

Main constitutional organs of the League were the Assembly, the council, and the Permanent Secretariat.

League Council acted as a type of executive body directing the Assembly's business.

The League Council met, on average, five times a year and in extraordinary sessions when required.

League Council oversaw the Permanent Court of International Justice and several other agencies and commissions created to deal with pressing international problems.

The ILO, although having the same members as the League Council and being subject to the budget control of the Assembly, was an autonomous organisation with its own Governing Body, its own General Conference and its own Secretariat.

The First Assembly in December 1920 recommended that the League Council take action aiming at the international organisation of intellectual work, which it did by adopting a report presented by the Fifth Committee of the Second Assembly and inviting a committee on intellectual co-operation to meet in Geneva in August 1922.

The League Council secured a commitment from Ethiopia to end slavery as a condition of membership in 1923, and worked with Liberia to abolish forced labour and intertribal slavery.

League Council succeeded in reducing the death rate of workers constructing the Tanganyika railway from 55 to 4 per cent.

League Council's 42 founding members, 23 remained members until it was dissolved in 1946.

The first member to withdraw permanently from the League Council was Costa Rica on 22 January 1925; having joined on 16 December 1920, this makes it the member to have most quickly withdrawn.

In expelling the Soviet Union, the League broke its own rule: only 7 of 15 members of the Council voted for expulsion, short of the majority required by the Covenant.

The questions the League Council considered in its early years included those designated by the Paris Peace treaties.

The British government referred the problem to the League's Council, but Finland would not let the League intervene, as they considered it an internal matter.

The League Council created a small panel to decide if it should investigate the matter and, with an affirmative response, a neutral commission was created.

In June 1921, the League Council announced its decision: the islands were to remain a part of Finland, but with guaranteed protection of the islanders, including demilitarisation.

On 12 August 1921, the League was asked to settle the matter; the Council created a commission with representatives from Belgium, Brazil, China and Spain to study the situation.

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The League Council sent a commission of representatives from various powers to the region.

In November 1921, the League Council decided that the frontiers of Albania should be the same as they had been in 1913, with three minor changes that favoured Yugoslavia.

The League Council examined the dispute, but then passed on their findings to the Conference of Ambassadors to make the final decision.

The conference accepted most of the League Council's recommendations, forcing Greece to pay fifty million lire to Italy, even though those who committed the crime were never discovered.

League Council resolved a dispute between the Kingdom of Iraq and the Republic of Turkey over control of the former Ottoman province of Mosul in 1926.

The League Council adopted the recommendation and decided on 16 December 1925 to award Mosul to Iraq.

The League Council condemned the Greek invasion, and called for both Greek withdrawal and compensation to Bulgaria.

In 1930, a League Council report confirmed the presence of slavery and forced labour.

League Council failed to prevent the 1932 war between Bolivia and Paraguay over the arid Gran Chaco region.

The League Council sanctions were lifted on 4 July 1936, but by that point, Italy had already gained control of the urban areas of Abyssinia.

Abyssinian crisis showed how the League Council could be influenced by the self-interest of its members; one of the reasons why the sanctions were not very harsh was that both Britain and France feared the prospect of driving Mussolini and Adolf Hitler into an alliance.

In February 1937, the League Council did ban foreign volunteers, but this was in practice a symbolic move.

League Council scored some successes, including the 1925 Conference for the Supervision of the International Trade in Arms and Ammunition and in Implements of War.

Since the onus of responsibility would, in practice, be on the great powers of the League Council, it was vetoed by Great Britain, who feared that this pledge would strain its own commitment to police its British Empire.

League Council was mostly silent in the face of major events leading to the Second World War, such as Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland, occupation of the Sudetenland and Anschluss of Austria, which had been forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles.

The final significant act of the League Council was to expel the Soviet Union in December 1939 after it invaded Finland.

Onset of the Second World War demonstrated that the League Council had failed in its primary purpose, the prevention of another world war.

In January 1920, when the League Council was born, Germany was not permitted to join because it was seen as having been the aggressor in the First World War.

The League Council was further weakened when major powers left in the 1930s.

The League had accepted Germany, as a permanent member of the council, in 1926, deeming it a "peace-loving country", but Adolf Hitler pulled Germany out when he came to power in 1933.

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The British Conservatives were especially tepid to the League Council and preferred, when in government, to negotiate treaties without the involvement of that organisation.

The archive of the League Council of Nations was transferred to the United Nations Office at Geneva and is an entry in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register.

League Council of Nations archives is a collection of the League Council's records and documents.