Human Instrumentality Committee

On paper, the Human Instrumentality Committee is a United Nations organ charged with monitoring NERV's progress. In truth it sits at the very top of SEELE and holds the UN itself under its control. Five members make up the body, with Keel Lorenz presiding as chairman.

Every session takes place over video conference. Where meetings of the complete SEELE council conceal their participants, Committee conferences actually display each member's image. Keel is the sole member the series ever names; the remaining four are distinguished only by the color tint shading their video feeds.

The Classified Information files in the game Neon Genesis Evangelion 2 lay out the Committee's true objective: to trigger Instrumentality on their own terms and fuse themselves into Evangelions fitted with S² Engines, elevating themselves to godhood. Their plans also called for destroying the genuine Spear of Longinus, since after their ascension it would remain the one weapon capable of striking them down. This stated motive leaves an acknowledged loose end, as it never explains why nine Mass Production Evangelions were built for five members.

To sustain the fiction of a UN subcommittee, each member nominally speaks for a different nation. Four of those nations also hold permanent seats on the real-world Security Council; China is conspicuously missing, its place on the Committee going to Germany instead. Gendo Ikari is regularly summoned before the body to answer for the progress of the project. The Committee appears in episodes 2, 10, 14, 17, and 20 of the series, gathering without Gendo in that final appearance.

Keel Lorenz chairs the Committee as the representative of Germany. The four unnamed members are identified by feed color: yellow for France, blue for Russia, green for the United States, and red for the United Kingdom. Only the green member's country is confirmed on screen, during a Committee exchange after the battle with Gaghiel in Episode 14; the other assignments come from production drawings published in the Neon Genesis Evangelion Newtype 100% Collection.

The English word Instrumentality nods to the Instrumentality of Mankind from Cordwainer Smith's science fiction novels. The Japanese term, hokan, combines characters meaning supplement and completion, which early fan translations rendered as Complementation, capturing the idea of individual egos completing one another, or of humanity being perfected into something higher.