Organization
The organization is governed by an International Commission with representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, and the United States. The Commission draws up the guidelines for the work to be carried out by the ITS and monitors these in the interests of the former victims of persecution. The Bonn Agreement of 1955 (which stated that no data that could harm the former Nazi victims or their families should be published) and their amendment protocols dating from 2006 provide the legal foundation of the International Tracing Service. The daily operations are managed by a director appointed by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), who must be a Swiss citizen. There are about 300 staff employed by the ITS.
In May 2008, the International Commission started a debate on the future structure and administration of the ITS. The discussion became necessary because the ICRC announced his withdrawal from the management and administration of the ITS by December 2012. The Commission has envisaged the German Federal Archive (Bundesarchiv) as new institutional partner. The mandate of the ITS will formally be extended by cataloguing, historical research, education and remembrance. The international character of the institution shall be preserved in the future.
Read more about this topic: International Tracing Service
Famous quotes containing the word organization:
“The organization controlling the material equipment of our everyday life is such that what in itself would enable us to construct it richly plunges us instead into a poverty of abundance, making alienation all the more intolerable as each convenience promises liberation and turns out to be only one more burden. We are condemned to slavery to the means of liberation.”
—Raoul Vaneigem (b. 1934)
“I would wish that the women of our country could embrace ... [the responsibilities] of citizenship as peculiarly their own. If they could apply their higher sense of service and responsibility, their freshness of enthusiasm, their capacity for organization to this problem, it would become, as it should become, an issue of profound patriotism. The whole plane of political life would be lifted.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)
“Your organization is not a praying institution. It’s a fighting institution. It’s an educational institution right along industrial lines. Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living!”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)