Compact of Free Association

The Compacts of Free Association (COFA) are international agreements establishing and governing the relationships of free association between the United States and the three Pacific Island sovereign states of the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM), the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI), and the Republic of Palau. As a result, these countries are sometimes known as the Freely Associated States (FASs). All three agreements next expire in 2043.

These countries, together with the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands, formerly constituted the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, a United Nations trusteeship administered by the United States Navy from 1947 to 1951 and by the US Department of the Interior from 1951 to 1986 (to 1994 for Palau).

The compacts came into being as an extension of the US–UN territorial trusteeship agreement, which obliged the federal government of the United States "to promote the development of the people of the Trust Territory toward self-government or independence as appropriate to the particular circumstances of the Trust Territory and its peoples and the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned".^[1] Under the compacts, the US federal government provides guaranteed financial assistance over a 15-year period administered through its Office of Insular Affairs in exchange for full international defense authority and responsibilities.

The Compacts of Free Association were initiated by negotiators in 1980 and signed by the parties in the years 1982 and 1983.^[2] They were approved by the citizens of the Pacific states in plebiscites held in 1983.^[3] Legislation on the compacts was adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1986 and signed into law on November 13, 1986.^[4]