The responsibility of international organizations for wrongful acts in peacekeeping operations: the case for dual attribution

Abstract

The United Nations (UN) was founded in 1945 with the primary objective of maintaining international peace and security. As part of this mandate, UN has been engaged in 71 Peacekeeping Operations (PKOs) as of July 2019. There are 13 active PKOs at the time of the writing. In addition, different peacekeeping operations have been undertaken by North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), African Union (AU) and Regional Economic Communities in Africa. This paper analyzes the accountability gap in international law with respect to the wrongful acts of peacekeepers. The paper explores the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (DARIO) to describe the attribution of wrongful conducts to IOs through the notion of operational command and control. The paper further examines leading cases of attribution by international judicial bodies in order to elucidate the operationalization of international norms to wrongful conducts during PKOs. Finally, the paper argues that for the adoption of dual responsibility as the way forward to ensure accountability for violations of international rules in PKOs.