On 22 January 2026, the United States, together with 19 other states, signed the Charter of the Board of Peace (BoP), a new international organisation for international security and peacebuilding. This blog post takes a first look at the BoP from the perspective of international institutional law. To do so, it examines UN Security Council Resolution 2803 (2025) alongside the BoP Charter, as leaked by The Times of Israel.
UN Security Council Resolution 2803 – Carte blanche for Donald Trump?
The initiative to create such a BoP was launched by U.S. President Donald Trump as an essential part of his “Comprehensive Plan to End the Gaza Conflict”. It envisages the BoP as a “new transitional body”, chaired by Donald Trump, tasked with coordinating and financing the reconstruction of Gaza.
The UN Security Council subsequently took up Trump’s Gaza plan in Resolution 2803 of 17 November 2025, which expressly welcomed the initiative. In the operative clause of the resolution, it addresses the Board of Peace directly:
“2. [The Security Council] welcomes the establishment of the Board of Peace (BoP) as a transitional administration with international legal personality that will set the framework, and coordinate funding for, the redevelopment of Gaza pursuant to the Comprehensive Plan, and in a manner consistent with relevant international legal principles”.
The Security Council “authorizes” the BoP and its members states to establish subsidiary entities entrusted with implementing a transitional civil administration for Gaza, with effect until 31 December 2027. These administrative entities shall operate under the authority and oversight of the proposed BoP.
While the authorization of states or international organisations to establish international civil administrations is not unprecedented, such mandates have traditionally been directed at the UN itself or individual states. Resolution 2803 marks a departure from this practice. In case of Gaza, the UN Security Council does not authorize a well-established regional or international organisation, but an entity that was only proposed in vague terms by Donald Trump and did not yet exist at the time the resolution was adopted.
Read in conjunction with Trump’s Gaza plan, the resolution suggests that the BoP is intended to function as an international organisation with its own international legal personality, “chaired by President Donald J. Trump“. Beyond the requirement to comply with the principles of international law and the constraints explicitly laid down in the resolution, however, the BoP appears to be subject to remarkably few legal limits.
By authorizing the BoP under Chapter VII of the UN Charter without a clearly defined institutional framework, the Security Council effectively delegates far-reaching public authority to an entity whose power structures were, at the relevant time, still unknown. There is no precedent in which the Security Council has empowered a not-yet-existing international organisation under Chapter VII of the UN Charter. In other words, the Council authorized an organisation without fully knowing what it was authorizing. Such conferral of power comes close to granting Donald Trump a carte blanche.
The Board of Peace: A “New” International Organisation?
Despite Donald Trump’s well-known scepticism towards international organisations, he has in fact created a new one. It follows from UN Security Council Resolution 2803 that the Board of Peace is intended to qualify as an international organisation, rather than as a subsidiary organ of the Security Council or a merely informal framework for intergovernmental cooperation. This assessment is reinforced by the BoP Charter, which constitutes a treaty governed by public international law.
The BoP further possesses several organs that are, at least formally, capable of forming a distinct will through majority decision-making. On closer inspection, this appearance of institutional autonomy is questionable. The Charter makes clear that Donald Trump, as Chairman, dominates the organisation in its entirety. Any decision of the Board of Peace as an assembly of members requires the final approval of the Chairman (art. 3.1 lit. e), and any decision of the Executive Board is subject to a veto by the Chairman (art. 4.1 lit. e). In practice, therefore, no decision can be taken without Donald Trump’s consent.
At the same time, the Charter formally separates the office of Chairman from the office of U.S. President (art. 3.2 lit. a). While Donald Trump’s presidential term ends in 2028, the office of Chairman is not subject to any temporal limitation. Legally speaking, the two offices must be distinguished. Decisions taken by Donald Trump as Chairman cannot simply be attributed to him as U.S. President, even though political realities may suggest otherwise. Decisions by the Chairman in fact constitute the distinct will of the organization. Therefore the BoP fulfils the standard definitional criteria of an international organisation.
The Institutional Structure of the Board of Peace
Compared to other universal international organisations, the Board of Peace exhibits a highly unusual concentration of powers. While many international organisations broadly share similar institutional features, their concrete institutional design is always the result of political compromise, shaped by their functions, and underlying power balances. Subject to ius cogens and other general obligations under international law, states remain largely free in shaping the institutional architecture of their international organizations. This freedom also applies to the founding of the BoP, although additional legal constraints may follow from Resolution 2803 or the UN Charter itself.
Prima facie, the overall structure of the BoP does not appear exceptional: an assembly of members (the Board of Peace), an Executive Board entrusted with implementation, and a Chairman acting as head and representative of the organisation.
On closer examination though, the institutional design is extremely unusual. The Chairman dominates the organisation in every respect. The Chairman enjoys final decision-making authority over all acts of both the Board of Peace and the Executive Board. Unlike in most international organisations, the Chairman is neither elected by the members nor appointed by a representative body. Instead, the Charter itself designates Donald Trump as the inaugural Chairman, who serves a lifetime term.
While lifetime terms are not entirely unknown in international institutional law, the comparison quickly reveals the anomaly. The Head of the Commonwealth, King Charles III, also serves for life; however, the role is purely ceremonial and the officeholder is elected by the members. By contrast, the Chairman of the BoP exercises executive and normative powers. The Chairmanship is also not structurally linked to a national office, as is the case in organisations such as the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Most strikingly, the Charter empowers Donald Trump himself to designate his successor (art. 3.3). The member states have no influence and control over the most powerful office within the organisation.
This concentration of power is without parallel. While not all international organisations follow the principle of “one state, one vote”, alternative models of allocation of votes are typically based on financial contributions (International Monetary Fund) or population size (European Union). In some cases, certain members may enjoy a veto power (cf. art. 27(3) UN Charter) with respect to specific decisions; but this power is assigned to several powers and not to a single individual. The BoP follows none of these models.
The BoP depends entirely on its Chairman Donald Trump. The Chairman’s exclusive powers include the decision on membership in the BoP (Art. 2.1, 2.2 lit. c, Art. 2.3), the final and authoritative interpretation of the Charter (Art. 7), the exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities (Art. 3.2 lit. b) and adoption of resolutions and directives on behalf of the organisation (Art. 9). He may even dissolve the organisation at any time (Art. 10.2). Adding to the controversy, the settlement of remaining asset issues upon dissolution falls to the Executive Board, whose members are exclusively selected by the Chairman (Art. 4.1 lit. a–b).
Conclusion
Formally, the BoP may qualify as an international organisation. Substantively, however, it could hardly be further away from the general idea of international cooperation. Member states exercise no meaningful influence over the organisation’s functions. The BoP Charter creates an appearance of legitimacy. But it does not impose any effective legal or political constraints on the Chairman and the Executive Board. In this sense, the BoP resembles less an international organisation than a Trump Corporation endowed with international legal personality. It remains questionable whether Chapter VII of the UN Charter and the general understanding of the UN as rule-based organization permit such an extensive privatization of enforcement powers in international law.
Zitiervorschlag: Schildheuer, Adrian, The Board of Peace – An international organization by the Grace of Trump, JuWissBlog Nr. 12/2026 v. 05.02.2026, https://www.juwiss.de/12-2026/.
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