Jurisdiction
The Ministry hears nothing that resolves inside a thousand years. If a consequence can be traced to a policy, a species, a coastline, a language, and it plays out fully within that horizon, it belongs to some other body — a court, a legislature, a protocol's own appeal clause. The Ministry's docket starts where every other institution's foresight already runs out.
Composition
No elected seats. Nobody now living will be alive to be held accountable by the future they ruled on, so accountability has to be engineered some other way. Three benches sit in rotation rather than one standing panel. A geological bench — paleoclimatologists, stratigraphers, people who read ice cores and sediment the way lawyers read precedent. An actuarial bench — the same discipline that prices pandemics and asteroid strikes, retrained on hundred-generation horizons instead of ten-year ones. And a kaitiaki bench, seated by rotation from institutions that already practise long-duration guardianship, because thousand-year stewardship isn't hypothetical — a few places have been doing it, imperfectly, for a while. The River That Sued is one such precedent the bench would draw on: not a thousand years yet, but running on the right kind of authority.
Powers
The Ministry cannot legislate, appropriate funds, or hold territory. It has exactly one power: to certify or withhold certification from any policy, protocol, or institution that claims a benefit lasting past the thousand-year horizon. Withheld certification doesn't block anything. It strips the claim. A dam gets built with or without the Ministry's blessing — it just doesn't get to call itself a legacy without it.
Contestation
Every certification decision publishes its full reasoning, dissent included, and any bench member can force a re-hearing once new stratigraphic or actuarial evidence crosses a stated threshold. The Ministry can be wrong. It gets checked by more time passing, which is the one resource it cannot manufacture on demand.
Sunset
The Ministry dissolves automatically every twenty-five years and must be re-founded by whatever bodies empowered it the first time. A thousand-year mandate held by an institution that never has to ask permission again isn't a ministry for the future. It's a sovereign wearing the future's face.