Nobody Ever Asked For Schedule 2. We Did. It Arrived In Six Days.
Thirty-one of the Committee's thirty-nine founding members had to build the authority that signed for them. The instrument provides a four-page form for doing it. In seventy-three years the depository has never sent one to this planet.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
THE HAGUE, Netherlands — Schedule 2 to the founding instrument is four pages long. It is called Instrument of Constitution of a Signing Authority. It is supplied to anyone who writes and asks.
We wrote and asked on 3 August. It arrived on 9 August, by post, with a receipt for fourteen units of account and no covering letter.
The depository has supplied it 1,104 times since 1953. Every one of those supplies was made against a file belonging to an existing member. Not one was made against any of the sixty-one applications on the accession file, including the one opened for this planet in 1953 and numbered 4.
What we got wrong in February
In February this newspaper reported that admission needs one signature and that nobody on Earth is constituted to give it.
That is still true. What we did not do — and a reader wrote in July to point it out — was ask whether the instrument has anything to say about how an applicant is supposed to acquire a signatory in the first place.
It does. It is an annex. It was fourteen units of account and six days away from a counter we had already stood at twice.
What the thirty-nine did
The Committee's thirty-nine members did not accede. They founded. The accession procedure has never been completed by anybody, which is why fifty-eight of the sixty-one open applications are still at stage two.
But the founders had the same problem, because in 1949 there was no Committee to be competent to bind anything to, and the register summarises how each of them solved it.
Thirty-one of the thirty-nine constituted a signing authority expressly in order to sign. Five had one already. Three do not say.
Six annexed the individually signed assent of every member of the applicant.
Twenty annexed a mechanism instead: nine a single referendum, seven a standing assembly, four a panel drawn by lot.
Paragraph 3
Everything that matters in Schedule 2 is one paragraph on page two.
It says that the constituting instrument must annex either the assent of every member of the applicant, individually given, or a mechanism by which that assent is obtained and can be shown to have been obtained.
Professor Naledi Furtwängler-Adeoye — who told this newspaper in February that no such procedure existed, and who opens her reply below by saying so — reads the second limb as considerably more generous than she would have predicted. A referendum counts. An assembly counts. A lottery counts.
She also reads it as no softer than it looks. The mechanism must obtain the assent of every member, and it must be capable of being shown to have done so.
The request log
It runs from 1953 and it is kept by hand until 1988 and by machine after.
1,104 supplies. The great majority are internal: a member reconstituting its own signing authority after a change of arrangements, which appears to happen to everybody every few decades and which the depository treats as unremarkable.
The log records the file a request was made against. It does not record the address it went to. So we cannot say that no copy of Schedule 2 has ever reached this planet — only that none was ever requested against a file that could have used it.
What the registrar said
Konstanty Roebuck-Sæther has now answered our questions at that counter three times.
Asked why nobody had mentioned Schedule 2 in February, he said that nobody had asked for it. Asked whether he might have volunteered it, he said that a registrar who volunteers is a registrar who advises, and that the office does not advise applicants because it would then be advising all sixty-one of them.
Asked, for the third time, why the Ardent Bank instrument has been lodged for twenty-six months without being docketed, he declined, in the same words as in February and in May.
What this desk takes from it
Not that a door was open. A form is not a door.
What is on the shelf is the specification for a machine this planet has never built: something with a published rule for how it obtains the assent of everybody, and a published record of having obtained it. Twenty of the thirty-nine built one. Several of them appear to have taken decades over it.
The four pages, the receipt, the request log, the thirty-nine summaries and Professor Furtwängler-Adeoye's marked-up copy are published with this story. The annexes themselves are in a language we cannot read and a quote for eleven months, and until we have them, the turnout in those nine referendums is a number this newspaper does not have and would very much like.
The six o'clock edition
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Sources & Method
This story exists because a reader wrote to us in July to ask a question our February piece had not thought of: if nobody on Earth can execute an instrument under Article 4(b), does the instrument say anything about how an applicant is meant to acquire someone who can? We went back to the depository and asked at the counter. The registrar said yes, Schedule 2, and asked whether we wanted it. We said yes, filled in a form, paid fourteen units of account and waited six days. Then we read the request log to find out who else had ever done that.
Who we spoke to
- Schedule 2 to the founding instrument, Instrument of Constitution of a Signing Authority — four pages. Requested by post on 3 August 2026 against file 4; supplied 9 August on payment of the standard fee; published entire with this story August 2026 Arrived with a covering slip, a receipt, and no correspondence of any kind.
- The depository's request log, Every supply of Schedule 2 since 1953. Read in the reading room over two days and photographed with permission 12–13 August 2026 1,104 supplies, every one of them against a file belonging to an existing member. None against any of the sixty-one open applications.
- Konstanty Roebuck-Sæther, Registrar of the accession file. Interviewed at the counter for the third time this year; again declined to be recorded, so our notes were typed within the hour and initialled by both reporters 12 August 2026 Answered every question about Schedule 2 without hesitation. Again declined the one about Ardent Bank.
- Prof. Naledi Furtwängler-Adeoye, Professor of public international law. Sent the four pages the day they arrived; interviewed twice by video call; her marked-up copy is published with this story August 2026 Told us in February that no such procedure existed. Opens her reply by saying so.
- The register's summaries of the thirty-nine annexes, One paragraph per founding signatory, in the working language. Read in the reading room; the underlying annexes are held in the depository's other language and were not read by us 12–13 August 2026
What we could not confirm
- What the annexes actually say. We read thirty-nine summaries of one paragraph each, prepared by the depository in the working language. The annexes themselves run to some hundreds of pages in a language we do not have, and the translation office has quoted us eleven months and a fee we are still arguing about.
- Whether any of the 1,104 supplies of Schedule 2 ever reached this planet. The log records the file the request was made against, not the address it went to. Every one of the 1,104 names a file belonging to a member, and twenty-two of those files have since been closed, which means we cannot inspect them to check.
- Why the Ardent Bank instrument is still undocketed. We asked the registrar for the third time. He declined for the third time, in the same words. It has now been lodged for twenty-six months and it remains the only thing in this file anybody has ever refused to explain to us.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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Signal & LedgerDepository Confirms Schedule 2 Available On Request, Fee Unchanged Since 1953
Trade-press treatment: the form, the fee, the turnaround, the postal arrangements.
Had that we did not
The four pages, the fourteen units of account, and the six-day despatch, all correct and all before anybody else had them.
Left out
Paragraph 3, which is the only part of the schedule that decides anything, and which is on the second of the four pages it described.
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The Hollow PostTHE FORM EXISTED ALL ALONG AND THEY LET US THINK THE DOOR WAS LOCKED
Read a seventy-three-year silence as an active withholding by a named registry.
Had that we did not
That the schedule exists, is public, and has never been sent here. All three are true.
Left out
That it is supplied to anyone who writes and asks, that the fee is fourteen units of account, and that this newspaper got it by writing and asking, which is the whole of our method and appears in our second paragraph.
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They Buriedthis newspaperNobody Ever Asked For Schedule 2. We Did. It Arrived In Six Days.
Went back to a story we had already published, found the thing we had missed, and led on our own miss.
Had that we did not
The request log entire, including the 1,104 supplies that went to somebody else.
Left out
That we stood at that counter in February, wrote nine hundred words about a signature block, and did not think to ask whether the instrument said anything about how a signature block gets filled. It does. It says it on page two of an annex we did not request. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Prof. Naledi Furtwängler-Adeoye, professor of public international law sent Schedule 2 on 10 August and the full draft on 14 August; given ten days. Asked that her reply run whole and that the first line not be softened. Printed unedited.
In February I told your reporter that there was no procedure for constituting a signing authority and that Article 4(b) was, in my words, a form we cannot fill in. I had not read Schedule 2. I had not read Schedule 2 because I did not know it existed, and I did not know it existed because I did not ask, and I was the expert in the room. Print that first and print it plainly, because the rest of what I have to say is a correction of your story and I have not earned the right to make it until I have made this one.
Now the correction.
You have written eight hundred words implying that a door has been standing open since 1953 and that this planet has walked past it out of incuriosity. That is a better story than the one the document supports.
Schedule 2 is four pages. Pages one, three and four are drafting furniture: recitals, execution formalities, a deposit address. The entire operative content is paragraph 3 on page two, and paragraph 3 does not tell you how to make a signing authority. It tells you what you must annex when you have made one. You must annex either the assent of every member of the applicant, individually given, or a mechanism by which that assent is obtained and can be shown to have been obtained.
That second limb is real and I was wrong to say nothing like it existed. Twenty of the thirty-nine used it. A referendum counts. A standing assembly counts. A panel drawn by lot counts. It is a good deal more generous than I would have predicted and I would like to know who drafted it.
But notice what it is not. It is not a lowering of the requirement. The mechanism must obtain the assent of every member and it must be capable of being shown to have obtained it. Nine of the thirty-nine annexed a referendum, and I would very much like to know what turnout those referendums recorded, and your own story admits you cannot tell me because you have read a one-paragraph summary and not the annex.
So here is where I think this actually stands, and it is neither your version nor the one I gave you in February.
The barrier is not the form. You are right about that and I was wrong. The form is on a shelf, it costs fourteen units of account, and it comes in six days.
The barrier is that paragraph 3 asks a question about us that we have never once tried to answer, at any scale, for any purpose: by what mechanism does this species assent to anything, and how would you show it. Every polity on this planet answers that question for its own members and none of them answers it for the whole. We have never needed to. Nobody has ever asked us for it except, apparently, since 1953, on page two of an annex, in a reading room, three days a week.
One last thing, since you asked me for something usable. If a body on this planet wished to begin — genuinely begin, not gesture — the first step is not the instrument and not the schedule. It is a mechanism with a published rule for how it obtains assent and a published record of having obtained it. That is a thing that can be built. It has been built for smaller purposes many times. It would take a generation and it would be extremely boring, which is, I suspect, why nobody has done it.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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