page_title: Commonwealth of Nations membership criteria
section_title: Founding documents
hierarchical_section_title: Commonwealth of Nations membership criteria / History / Founding documents
caption_attribution_description: Rt. Hon. Louis S. St. Laurent - Prime Minister of Canada (1948-1957).
context_page_description: Commonwealth of Nations membership criteria are the corpus of requirements that member states and prospective member states must meet to be allowed to participate in the Commonwealth of Nations. The criteria have been altered by a series of documents issued over the past eighty-two years.
  The most important of these documents were the Statute of Westminster, the London Declaration, the Singapore Declaration, the Harare Declaration, the Millbrook Commonwealth Action Programme, the Edinburgh Declaration, and the Kampala Communiqué. New member states of the Commonwealth must abide by certain criteria that arose from these documents, the most important of which are the Harare principles and the Edinburgh criteria.
  The Harare principles require all member states of the Commonwealth, old and new, to abide by certain political principles, including democracy and respect for human rights. These can be enforced upon current members, who may be suspended or expelled for failure to abide by them. To date, Fiji, Nigeria, Pakistan, and Zimbabwe have been suspended on these grounds; Zimbabwe later withdrew.
context_section_description: The formation of the Commonwealth of Nations is dated back to the Statute of Westminster, an Act of the British Parliament passed on 11 December 1931.  The Statute established the independence of the Dominions, creating a group of equal members where, previously, there was one (the United Kingdom) paramount.  The solitary condition of membership of the embryonic Commonwealth was that a state be a Dominion.  Thus, the independence of Pakistan (1947), India (1947), and the Dominion of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) (1948) saw the three countries join the Commonwealth as independent states that retained the King as head of state. On the other hand, Burma (1948) and Israel (1948) did not join the Commonwealth, as they chose to become republics.  In 1949, the Commonwealth chose to regard Ireland as no longer being a member when Ireland repealed the External Relations Act under which the King had played a role in its diplomatic relations with other states, although the Irish government’s view was that Ireland had not been a member for some years.
  With India on the verge of promulgating a republican constitution, the 1949 Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference was dominated by the impending departure of over half of the Commonwealth's population.  To avoid such a fate, Canadian Prime Minister Louis St. Laurent proposed that republics be allowed to remain in the Commonwealth, provided that they recognise King George VI as 'Head of the Commonwealth'. Known as the London Declaration, this agreement thus established the only formalised rule as being that members must recognise the Head of the Commonwealth. The arrangement prompted suggestions that other countries, such as France, Israel, and Norway, join.  However, until Western Samoa joined in 1970, only recently independent countries would accede.
caption: Louis St. Laurent, the author of the London Declaration formula that laid out embryonic membership criteria.
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