Why did a wider table leave the claim of jurisdiction as narrow as before?

Who was at the table, and what the text set up

Members of the Arab ministerial committee on Jerusalem met in Jordan on Wednesday with the Arab League secretary-general and representatives of Turkiye, Pakistan, Indonesia and Malaysia. Their joint declaration sets up a permanent mechanism to document Israeli measures at the city's holy sites and a media platform to carry that documentation to international organisations. Arab League Secretary-General Ahmed Aboul Gheit attended.^[1]

The declaration said Jerusalem is "in escalating danger, and its Islamic and Christian sanctuaries are threatened as never before", and called for international action to halt the Israeli measures. The ministers also scheduled a joint ministerial meeting on Jerusalem during the UN General Assembly session in New York in September.^[1]

Does documentation create an obligation?

In the column published this morning I argued that calling four more states to the table had not widened the binding text. The meeting's output supports that reading: the instruments it establishes are instruments of documentation and publication. Neither places an obligation on any party; both raise the visibility, and therefore the political cost, of a practice. The text does not touch the question of who holds the power to decide.^{[1], [2]}

There is a case to be read against that. Although the documentation mechanism produces no sanction by itself, it creates a shared file to carry into the September meeting. Whether the mechanism has become an instrument will be seen in September: if the joint ministerial meeting the declaration provides for submits documents to a named international body, the mechanism has begun to work; if the meeting only repeats the declaration, it has not.^[1]

The question the September meeting has to answer

The declaration also wrote its own test: a joint ministerial meeting on Jerusalem will be held in New York in September. The question to be answered there is not merely whether the mechanism has produced documents. To which body, in what capacity and with what request the documents are submitted will also be settled there. Today's text does not answer that, and its silence is not a failing; what a widening table can agree on in a first round is usually procedure.^[1]