This book deals with the nature of international organisations and the tension between their legal nature and the system of classic, state-based international law. This tension is important in theory and practice, particularly when organisations are brought under the rule of international law and have to be conceptualised as legal subjects, for example in the context of accountability. The position of organisations is complicated by what the author terms 'the institutional veil', comparable to the corporate veil found in corporate law. The book focuses on the law of treaties, as this pre-eminently 'horizontal' branch of international law brings out the problem particularly clearly. The first part of the book addresses the legal phenomenon of international organisations, their legal features as independent concepts, the history of international organisations and of legal thought in respect of them, and the development of contemporary law on international organisations. The second part deals with the practice of international organisations and treaty-making. It discusses treaty-making practice within organisations, judicial practice in interpretation of organisations' constitutive treaties, and the practice of treaty-making by organisations. The third and final part analyses the process by which international organisations have been brought under the rule of the written law of treaties, offering a practical application of the conceptual framework as previously set out. Part three is at the same time an analytic overview of the drafting history of the 1986 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties between States and International Organizations or between International Organizations. This is a profound and penetrating examination of the character of international organisations and their place in international law, and will be an important source for anyone interested in the future role of organisations in the international legal system.

This book sets out a plea for lawyers to understand the purpose and potential of international law on its own terms.

This book offers a comparative analysis of the institutional law of public international organizations, covering issues such as membership, institutional structure, decisions and decision-making, legal status, privileges and immunities. It has been designed to appeal to both academics and practitioners.

This book offers a comparative analysis of the institutional law of public international organizations, covering issues such as membership, institutional structure, decisions and decision-making, legal status, privileges and immunities. It has been designed to appeal to both academics and practitioners.

The proliferation of international courts and the extension of international regulation to new areas have been considered to be threatening for the unity of Public International Law as a legal system. These developments are the consequence of the increasing formation of legal subsystems (material international regimes) which continue to grow in complexity. How these trends affect the unity of the international legal system requires theoretical scrutiny of its fundamental bases. This work considers that the unity of the international legal system depends upon its normative structure, and on the social medium in which it is applied: the evolving international community. A unified international legal system has as its ultimate goal the protection of human dignity through the international regulation of human rights. The question of the unifying stability of the international legal system and the development of legal subsystems within it encourages a review of the major issues of current Public International Law, considering the evolution from traditional doctrines to recent approaches. This review is done from an analytical frame that provides a deeper understanding of the current situation of Public International Law as a legal system.

This book addresses fundamental aspects of the concept of public international law in both theory and practice. The argument developed by the author is that, underlying the traditional, horizontal, structure of public international law, a vertical structure of the concept of law may be discerned. This vertical structure is seen unfolding into two, mutually exclusive, frameworks: a framework of obligation, accounting for obligations, and a framework of authorization, accounting for rights. The problem then arising is that a concept of public international law which only admits either rights or obligations cannot be regarded as coherent. The author, however, takes and substantiates the position that coherence can be achieved by suppressing the mutual exclusivity of both frameworks. This move paves the way to formulating the function of public international law in terms of the constituting of international society. Since in public international law the theoretical aspects profoundly affect practice, this book is not only of interest to academics, but also for practitioners, such as officials of foreign offices and international institutions.

This groundbreaking book uses the idea of experience to investigate the various ways in which international organizations are understood by judges, legal practitioners, legal researchers, legal theorists, and thinkers of global governance.

The ever-growing interaction between member States and international organisations results, all too often, in situations of non-conformity with international law (eg peacekeeping operations, international economic adjustment programmes, counter-terrorism sanctions). Seven years after the finalisation of the International Law Commission's Articles on the Responsibility of International Organisations (ARIO), international law on the allocation of international responsibility between these actors still remains unsettled. The confusion around the nature and normative calibre of the relevant rules, the paucity of relevant international practice supporting them and the lack of a clear and principled framework for their elaboration impairs their application and restricts their ability to act as effective regulatory formulas. This study aims to offer doctrinal clarity in this area of law and purports to serve as a point of reference for all those with a vested interest in the topic. For the first time since the publication of the ARIO, all international responsibility issues dealing with interactions between member States and international organisations are put together in one book under a common approach. Structured around a systematisation of the interactions between these actors, the study provides an analytical framework for the regulation of indirect responsibility scenarios. Based on the ideas of the intellectual fathers of international law, such as Scelle's 'dédoublement fonctionnel' theory and Ago's 'derivative responsibility' model, the book employs old ideas to add original argumentation to a topic that has been dealt with extensively by recent commentators.