Law Of International Organizations Research Articles

Rewriting the law of international organizations: Whither the Asia Pacific?

Abstract The law of international organizations is often described in terms of both its universality and its unity. Writers in this field begin their texts with an acknowledgement that there are common legal principles that have been developed by, and can be applied to, a variety of international organizations. The idea that there are legal principles applicable to multiple organizations – whatever their membership, location, powers, technical functions, or financial resources – is also implicit in the reports of the International Law Commission discussing the immunities, responsibilities, and law-making capacity of international organizations. But despite this search for common principles, a question remains whether international institutional law is based on the practice of all, or at the very least, a range, of organizations. Writers in this field have tended to focus on the activities of organizations based in either Europe or North America, including the United Nations and its specialized agencies, the European Union, and Council of Europe. This article argues that the omission of the principles and practices of organizations outside Europe and the United Nations’ system, specifically Asia Pacific organizations, undermines the claim of international institutional law to be universal. It explores the way in which a more inclusive approach – one that pays attention to the perspectives of Asia Pacific organizations – could illuminate certain features of the law and lead international lawyers to reconceive some of its central principles.

Book Review: Liangxi Guojizuzhifa [梁西国际组织法（第八版）] [Liangxi's Law of International Organizations — Principles and Practice] by Liang Xi, Updated and Augmented by Yang Zewei

Book Review: <i>Liangxi Guojizuzhifa [梁西国际组织法（第八版）] [Liangxi's Law of International Organizations — Principles and Practice]</i> by Liang Xi, Updated and Augmented by Yang Zewei

C Wilfred Jenks and the Futures of International Organizations Law

C Wilfred Jenks and the Futures of International Organizations Law

What drives OPEC production policy?

Abstract The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) is the international organization with the function of coordinating and unifying the petroleum policies of its member countries. It centrally controls much of the world’s oil supply. While this is generally accepted, it is not well understood how OPEC exercises this broad function, what drives its decision-making. The article closes this gap in the literature through a close study of the published OPEC production policies for the period of 2019–2022. The article finds that internally predicted demand was the primary driver, over external factors that could also have affected production decisions, such as sanctions on OPEC or OPEC+ members, the rise of US shale oil, or climate change mitigation. It follows that consumer states can most effectively influence OPEC petroleum production decision-making by reducing their own oil consumption. The article finally places these findings into a broader context of the law of international organizations, where organizations have a responsibility to exercise their functions within evolving international law. Their decision-making can then be assessed through the three vector-matrix that this article proposes, comprising internal drivers, external factors, and the position of third states.

Rosalyn Higgins on International Organizations and International Law: The Value and Limits of a Policy-Oriented Approach

Abstract Taking an approach to international law that embraced key features of the New Haven School, Rosalyn Higgins has made several important contributions to the law of international organizations. In 1963, at a time when no theory had addressed the work of the United Nations’ (UN) political organs, Higgins showed how General Assembly resolutions and other decisions contribute to the development of customary international law. She also demonstrated that, separate and apart from UN member states, the UN Secretariat was contributing to the development of customary international law regarding treaties. Later, as counsel for the International Tin Council and later rapporteur for the Institut de Droit International, Higgins put on the global agenda the issue of the accountability of international organizations for harm to third parties, highlighting gaps in existing law and competing policy concerns that precluded easy solutions. Higgins made two contributions in marking the path forward for theorizing about international organizations, one substantive and the other methodological. She highlighted the importance of considering international organizations in relation to the full range of actors with whom they interact, including private parties. As a methodological matter, Higgins demonstrated the value of an inductive approach where legal claims are grounded in close, detailed and careful observations of how international organizations actually operate.

International Institutions as Forms and Fora: Rao Geping and the Law of International Organizations in China

Abstract This article examines the emergence and development in China of the discipline of international organizations law by specifically focusing on the scholarship of Professor Rao Geping, a founding figure of the discipline. Rao’s writings are read in light of his personal life and professional career as well as China’s economic and social reforms and its foreign policy. A communitarian, cooperative and legal approach to international organizations emerged as Rao’s choice. International organizations are seen mostly as fora for interstate deliberations and negotiations and are approached mainly from their procedural aspect and channelling function. What has been highlighted is a facilitative, procedural and instrumental conception of international organizations rather than an autonomous, functional or regulatory one. Rao advocates an inclusive approach to international organizations, which tends to include flexible, informal frameworks into the ambit of the study of international organizations. In constructing institutions as forms and fora, Rao’s writings effectively play a double role, translating the liberal, progressive ideas of international organizations into domestic international legal studies and facilitating China’s continuous economic reform and political integration into the international system. Rao’s scholarship presents an instructive example of how a scholar from a semi-periphery country may navigate various tensions and paradoxes behind universal concepts and negotiate their concept of international organizations.

The law and practice of international organizations’ interactions with personal data protection domestic regulation: At the crossroads between the international and domestic legal orders

The development and overlap of legal frameworks on personal data protection, on the one hand, by states and regional frameworks like the EU General Data Protection Regulation, and on the other hand, by International Organizations, raises fundamental questions about their coexistence and interaction, including questions concerning the interaction between the domestic and the international legal orders.This article considers how these different legal frameworks come into interaction and tension with each other, as well as how these tensions are addressed in the law and practice of International Organizations and in domestic laws.It reveals the pragmatism of a resulting approach which seeks to ensure effective protection of the fundamental right to personal data protection while respecting the need for IOs to be able to perform their mandate under international law in full independence.

Samuel Kwadwo Boaten Asante and the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (1975–1992)

Abstract This article uses Samuel Kwadwo Boaten Asante’s career at the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC) as a prism for examining the place of Third World Approaches to International Law within mainstream international organizations (IO) law. By focusing on his role as chief legal adviser, director and highest-ranking legal civil servant at the UNCTC during the heydays of the New International Economic Order (NIEO), it uncovers a less-examined international institution and the dilemmas faced by the Third World international legal civil servant. By examining Asante’s intellectual history and publications during the operational years of the UNCTC, it identifies three main under-explored typologies of Third World approaches to IO law. It argues that the low visibility of Third World approaches within mainstream IO law is closely linked to the failures of the NIEO movement, the abolition of the UNCTC, which symbolized the non-realization of aspirations to codify the principles of the NIEO through IOs, and minimal engagement by IO law scholars with Third World problems. This article argues that, even though the UNCTC ceased to exist in 1992, it created a lasting legacy through its advisory services, which forms part of IO law history.

Small Powers, International Organizations and the Role of Law: Jorge Castañeda’s Views from Mexico

Abstract This article examines the work of Mexican diplomat and jurist Jorge Castañeda as an insight into the trajectory of international legal thought in the semi-periphery on international organizations. It argues that Castañeda adopted a distinct approach to international organizations law that foregrounds power asymmetries. The article considers three interventions made by Castañeda that express this semi-peripheral approach and have lasting relevance. First, it shows how, by focusing on the interests of small powers, Castañeda’s work in the 1950s departed from functionalist optimism and stressed the tension between rule by international organizations and domestic rule, emphasizing the centrality of the reserved domain and drawing lessons for strategic legal engagement for small powers. Second, this article studies how Castañeda’s concern for the cause of small powers shaped his views on regionalism, grounding his critique of Pan-Americanism and his vindication of the United Nations (UN) to attenuate the perils of regionalism. Third, this article retrieves Castañeda’s defence of the UN General Assembly as a platform for international law-making, contextualizes it within the rise of decolonization and explores the implications for his earlier sceptical views about the expansion of UN powers. The article concludes by highlighting the significance of the thought of semi-peripheral jurists for any efforts aimed at re-theorizing international organizations.

Transparency as a Contested Fundamental in the Law of International Organizations

Abstract Against the backdrop of a recent turn to theory in the field of international organizations law this short article, part of the Special Forum on Contested Fundamentals of the Law of International Organizations, brings to the fore a characteristic of the international organization that should not be missing in the canon of fundamentals in international organizations scholarship. This is the transparency of international organizations as a legal entity and as a legal actor. ‘Transparency’ here refers to the phenomenon that member states and other institutional components are to some extent legally visible. ‘Legally visible’ means that the component parts of an organization, notably the member states, are addressed from, and involved in, the general international plane – a condition which is dynamic and context-dependent. In the words of the ila, organizations are layered creatures, ‘conducting … multilevel operations’. The article sets out how the transparency of organizations is a fundamental in two ways: as a legal-ontological claim, and as an analytical lens. Moreover the transparency of international organizations is subject to systemic and political contestation, albeit often in an implicit manner. The article concludes by arguing that the lens of transparency has lasting relevance and analytical value, as it helps to lay bare an elusive and continual dynamic in the legal manifestation of international organizations.

Towards a Political Economy of International Organizations Law

Abstract This article is part of the Special Forum on Contested Fundamentals of the Law of International Organizations. It endorses a possible political economy of international organizations law, and explains why such would be desirable. The dominant approach to international organizations is unable to explain much of what is going on, and thus needs to be replaced by an approach more sensitive to the economic and organizational aspects of international organizations.

Introduction: Contested Fundamentals of the Law of International Organizations: Repositioning Legal Theory

Introduction: Contested Fundamentals of the Law of International Organizations: Repositioning Legal Theory

Institutional Sanctions and Functionalism: Insights from the Most Recent Practice

Abstract The article aims to discuss the most recent practice of institutional sanctions in light of contested fundamentals of the law of International Organizations (ios). The analysis delves, in particular, into sanctions adopted by ios having technical mandates in situations of wider political disputes among members, concerning international peace and security issues, amidst the United Nations (UN) Security Council’s failure to take coercive measures under Chapter vii of the UN Charter. Of special interest is the suspension of membership rights and privileges which some technical ios have deliberated following the conflict in Syria and the undergoing war in Ukraine (para. 2). These instances offer a test bed to challenge the fundamental theoretical paradigm of the law of ios, that is functionalism, and to extract some ambiguities underlying the essence of ios, revealing the continuous oscillation between policy and technocracy, which is endemic to the institutional life of every io and is well reflected in the different attitudes of the members and the Secretariats. The article highlights, in particular, the tension between politics and law that emerges from the adoption of sanctions by ios endowed with highly technical tasks (para. 3), the invocation of the ‘politicisation’ mantra by the targeted member to oppose the application of the privative measures (para. 4), and the ambivalent use of functionalist ‘language’ within the reacting io (para. 5). The article concludes with some final remarks on the ‘strategic’ use of ios (para. 6).

Hidden Gems in International Organizations Law – A Brief Introduction

International organizations law, it is fair to say, is dominated by a functionalist approach. States, so this approach provides in a nutshell, create international organizations to tackle transboundary problems. States delegate functions and competences to those organizations, and international organizations law has developed to facilitate the work of the organizations. International organizations can boast such ‘implied powers’ as are necessary for their effective functioning, and are typically granted privileges and immunities to ensure that functioning is unimpeded. Whatever the merits of such an approach (and much here may depend on the political perspective adopted), it comes with a few drawbacks. Most notably, everything that cannot be pictured in terms of the principal/agent relationship (between the organization and its member states) becomes difficult to explain and difficult to practice. The most obvious issue here is the accountability of international organizations towards third parties: since third parties are not part of the principal/agent relationship, the functionalist approach has little to offer – as numerous, ultimately fruitless attempts to establish accountability or responsibility regimes demonstrate.

Deformalizing International Organizations Law: The Risk Appetite of Anne-Marie Leroy

Abstract Taking on this Symposium’s invitation to rethink international organizations law by focusing on scholars and practitioners outside the mainstream, this article explores and evaluates the legacy of Anne-Marie Leroy, the World Bank General Counsel from 2009 to 2016. In her attempt to trade the formal, rigid language of law for the deformalized routine of risk management – described as a ‘paradigm shift’ from ‘rules to principles’ – Leroy could be portrayed as an antipode to those who developed or nurtured the discipline of international organizations law. Yet it is precisely by focusing on figures working outside (and against) the diagrams of the discipline that we can gain a critical perspective on the evolving life of law in international institutions. The article specifically focuses on how Leroy’s paradigm shift sought to bypass, manage, and overcome problems of operational expansion and institutional accountability to the outside world – perhaps the two frontiers where the conceptual normative confidence of mainstream, functionalist approaches most manifestly hit their limits. In both domains, the article shows, the principled (occasionally prohibitive) posture of liberal legalism instilled by some of Leroy’s predecessors had to be traded for an attitude of ‘agility’ and enhanced ‘risk appetite’. This article traces these changes in the professional sensibility and material practice of international law(yering) and critically evaluates the ‘new normative architecture’ of ‘risk’ that underpins it. It is by dwelling in this disjunction between familiar doctrinal dilemmas and mundane material practices of lawyering – a space teeming with unexpected rules and routines – that a critical reinvigoration, reorientation, and re-theorization of international organizations law can emerge.

ПРАВОВЫЕ ГРАНИЦЫ ГАРМОНИЗАЦИИ ЗАКОНОДАТЕЛЬСТВА НОВОГО УЗБЕКИСТАНА И ДИПЛОМАТИЧЕСКОГО ПРАВА МЕЖДУНАРОДНЫХ ОРГАНИЗАЦИЙ

The article analyzes the positive impact of changes in the modern period of development in the country, in connection with the increased participation of Uzbekistan in the activities of various international organizations, including the formation and development of the diplomatic law of international organizations in the system of diplomatic and consular law. It is noted that over the past quarter of a century, an integral system of domestic regulatory legal acts has been created that regulate the membership and participation of Uzbekistan in the activities of international organizations, as well as the opening of representative offices and missions at international organizations, their status, privileges and immunities. It was also emphasized that in recent years, consistent work has been carried out to radically improve the legal framework for foreign policy and foreign economic activity of the country, as well as the legal framework for multilateral cooperation of the Republic of Uzbekistan with international organizations. In this connection, the legal documents aimed at developing the sphere of diplomatic law of international organizations have been studied. Since the fundamental reforms that began five years ago in New Uzbekistan played a colossal role in the country’s transition to a new, modern path of development and modernization, increasing the efficiency of the domestic and foreign policy of the state. Based on the results of the study, a number of recommendations were put forward aimed at improving the system of legislation.

The Case of Implied External Powers – The History of Pragmatism in the EU’s External Relations Law

EU external relations law is not very much at the centre of the Hungarian EU legal discourse, so the matter of implied external competences may seem almost mystical. However, it is not mysterious at all, its development is rather evidence of the presence of pragmatism in the development of EU law, as the implied external powers were even used to extend competences in the period of the EEC. The aim the paper is to show how this pragmatism has been manifested from time to time in the development of the implied external competences. To do so, the paper also draws on Sinclair’s theory, who sees the phenomenon of the expansion of powers in the law of international organisations as a coherent process in some cases. Accordingly, the article describes case C-22/70. Commission v. Council (ERTA), including the main arguments made in the case, and the relevant circumstances as well. This is followed by the explanation of the expansion of the implied powers to highlight the appearance of its different aspects involved. Finally, the paper points out a “dialogue” that has been developed between the Member States and the Court of Justice during the process of the Constitutional Treaty and the Lisbon reforms.

A Bridge and a Pivot: The ILO and International Organizations Law in Times of Crisis

A Bridge and a Pivot: The ILO and International Organizations Law in Times of Crisis

How the Power of the Idea Disempowered the Law: Understanding the Resilience of the Law of International Organisations

How the Power of the Idea Disempowered the Law: Understanding the Resilience of the Law of International Organisations

Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of International Organizations Law

Towards a Postcolonial Genealogy of International Organizations Law