Why have regional organizations become authorities over human rights and international intervention, and what explains the differences in regional authority across different regions? Why did leaders in some parts of the Global South go from rejecting any interference to arguing for the central role of regional organizations in international interference? This chapter introduces the central questions addressed by this book and provides an overview of its core argument, focusing on the creation of new regional authority at one important moment: the emergence of regional organizations as authorities over human rights. This was the first time when leaders in the Global South changed from arguing for complete non-interference to arguing that legitimate interference should be carried out by or with the involvement of regional organizations. They did so as a strategy of subtle resistance to new challenges to self-determination, in the form of economic enforcement of human rights by Western governments. In regions targeted by this enforcement, leaders responded by establishing their regional organizations as authorities over human rights, accepting regional interference for the first time.

This chapter examines how China’s economic displacement of the United States affects voting patterns in international organizations. Using data from the UN General Assembly, UN Human Rights Council, and Organization of American States, the analysis reveals that when China’s economic weight surpasses that of the US in Latin American countries, these nations are less likely to align their votes with US positions. The study finds that economic displacement reduces vote convergence with the US in the UNGA, increases the probability of voting against US-supported resolutions in the UNHRC, and decreases vote alignment in the OAS. These findings suggest that China’s growing economic influence diminishes US leverage in international forums, even in organizations where China is not a member. The chapter argues that this effect stems from reduced efficacy of US economic statecraft as countries gain alternative economic partners, granting them greater autonomy in foreign policy decisions.

Just a few years after Latin American leaders began to establish regional authority over human rights, African leaders started to face similar economic pressure in their relations with European governments, most significantly in the context of the Lomé Convention, an aid and preferential trade agreement with the European Economic Community. In response, African leaders created their own regional human rights system from scratch, setting up a human rights charter and a commission to enforce the charter within the Organization of African Unity. This chapter traces the drafting history of the African Charter of Human and Peoples’ Rights, showing that the initiative to create a regional human rights system was led by prominent human rights advocates who wanted an African-owned and -led system. Many African leaders were concerned with the level of authority given to the proposed human rights commission and the fact that it compromised on non-interference. They ultimately accepted it, in spite of these concerns, because of the shadow cast by new Western enforcement.

Where the 1970s and 1980s was a period of dramatic change in the use of regional organizations and attitudes towards the norm of non-interference in Latin America and Africa, the Middle East followed a very different trajectory. The changes in global norms and advocacy surrounding human rights in the 1970s coincided with the Middle East’s increased importance in Western foreign policy and the explosion of oil wealth in the region. Because of this, Western governments did not attempt to enforce human rights in this region, and as a result, leaders in the region made no changes towards establishing regional authority over human rights. Instead, the emergence of the human rights movement in the 1970s had the effect of short-circuiting earlier advances towards creating human rights institutions. It was only in the early 2000s, following the start of the Global War on Terror, that the Arab League finally began to develop new human rights institutions, and these institutions have been weaker and subject to greater state control. In contrast to Latin America and Africa, regional human rights institutions in the Middle East represent a straightforward attempt to deflect international pressure.

This chapter describes the changes in beliefs about human rights that occurred in the 1970s and the new forms of enforcement that this encouraged and enabled. This included the use of economic pressure to enforce human rights. Beginning at this time, enforcing human rights through international interference came to be understood as not just permissible, but as the duty of the international community. In the context of these changing beliefs, Western governments began to use economic pressure to enforce human rights in the Global South. However, as this chapter demonstrates, these governments systematically enforced human rights in regions where enforcement was relatively cheap and easy. They did so in Latin America and Africa, while at the same time subsuming human rights to other strategic priorities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia. These enforcement policies clashed with understandings of self-determination held by actors throughout the Global South, and they were regarded as an illegitimate imposition. However, in the context of changing beliefs about human rights, appealing to the norm of non-interference was no longer effective at deterring Western interference.

Latin America was the first and most intense target of the imposition of economic enforcement of human rights. The strategy of establishing regional organizations as authorities over human rights emerged in response to these new enforcement policies. This meant greatly expanding the authority of the Organization of American States and, for the first time, allowing it to interfere in member states’ internal affairs to enforce human rights. This strategy emerged first as an authoritarian survival strategy put forward by the Chilean government in response to unprecedented challenges to its domestic behaviors. However, democratic leaders in the region transformed it into a strategy involving real enforcement once economic pressure spread to the entire region. As this chapter demonstrates, the idea that regional organizations have special authority over human rights had not been taken for granted prior to this, as human rights were not understood as an issue that could be altered to fit local contexts. Instead, Latin American leaders–including democracies and leaders supporting human rights enforcement–argued forcefully for this new authority.

This chapter explores the growing prevalence of non-staff personnel within the UN system and the legal challenges they face in accessing justice. As non-staff personnel increasingly take on roles traditionally held by staff, they remain largely excluded from the jurisdiction of IATs and often may only avail themselves of arbitration clauses that can be prohibitive in practice. The chapter examines potential legal implications of this situation, such as functional immunity before domestic courts, as well as proposed solutions, such as alternative dispute mechanisms and expedited arbitration. It reviews current UN pilot projects aimed at providing non-staff personnel with informal dispute resolution avenues and discusses potential reforms to bridge the access-to-justice gap.

This chapter summarizes the empirical findings by comparing the three international courts. It shows that the EACJ has been the most deferential of the three courts, followed by the CCJ, and the African Court has been the least deferential. At the same time, the EACJ has the narrowest strategic space, the African Court the broadest and the CCJ lies between. The comparative analysis corroborates the theoretical argument of the book as each court’s deference closely aligns with its degree of formal independence and the extent of political fragmentation among its member states. The chapter revisits the book’s core argument by discussing the scope of the argument and considering its generalizability. It concludes with a discussion of the book’s implications for interdisciplinary research on international courts and IR literature on IOs in contemporary world politics.

Jan KlabbersThis epilogue takes stock of the volume and sketches some of the ramifications: if the vacuum assumption (i.e. international organizations only interact with their member states) no longer holds, assuming it ever did, then what? The author proposes that international organizations are better seen as political and economic actors in their own right. They may be given a function upon establishment, but usually develop a certain autonomy. This renders them closer to administrative agencies and offers a more realistic foundation on which to build further legal thought – and thus might be able to take third parties into account.

Although international organizations have always made some revenue in selling publications and organizing events, their activity in selling goods and services has increased significantly during the past few decades. From charging fees for the use of online platforms to selling visa services to governments, and from providing passenger and cargo transport to collecting aviation route charges on behalf of members states, international organizations now sell a wide variety of goods and services to private actors, states and other organizations. In other words, international organizations increasingly act in the market in ways resembling private actors, in addition to adopting business-like practices and mindsets in other ways, oftentimes raising difficult legal questions about their constitutional competence, immunity and responsibility. This article maps the market activities of international organizations, analyses the reasons behind their increasing importance and asks how they fit within the law of international organizations. In so doing, the article also challenges traditional, member state-centric perspectives to international organizations.

This chapter sets the tone for the volume, by demonstrating that international organizations law has traditionally been constructed around the fundamental assumption that the only legally relevant dynamic is the relationship between the organization and its member states. The law, in other words, has grown up in a vacuum, illustrated by the absence of clauses granting international organizations legal personality under international law (until well into the second half of the twentieth century) and illustrated by the absence of explicit treaty-making competences. International organizations were never expected to interact with others than their own member states; as a result, today’s international organizations law has a hard time accommodating third parties.

Dimitri van den MeersscheThis chapter traces the many entanglements between international organizations and private actors in the space of global security governance. By analysing the controversies surrounding the mandate of Europol and the contribution of private actors in countering terrorism online, it describes three modalities of entanglement: (i) private actors as sites of data collection and providers of sources of information that are increasingly relied upon by international institutions, (ii) enrolment of private platforms in the implementation of governance projects by international organizations, and (iii) alignment of such governance projects to the logic of tech companies and platforms – what Johns has described as a ‘lean start up’ mentality. Having traced these multiple points of influence, interaction and interdependence, the chapter proposes an infrastructural approach to the study of such public–private cooperation. This implies a recognition of how law and materiality are entangled in the production of social order and attentiveness to the role of digital infrastructures and socio-technical protocols in redrawing the public–private divide and constituting, mediating and materializing the exercise of international institutional authority. These observations crystalize in an urgent call to direct our thinking on rights and regulation towards these infrastructural formations and the political affordances that they entail.

This chapter explores the role of law in organizational interaction. In contrast with recent work on international institutional law that seeks to overcome functionalism and make legal sense of interaction, this chapter argues that interaction among international organizations is a legally constituted phenomenon, in two specific senses. First, law constitutes the space of the interaction (that is, the ‘organizational ecosystem’). Second, law provides the background norms for organizational autonomy and the vocabulary for the decoupling of the organization’s practice and its formal goals. Such a decoupling through institutional law allows international organizations to flexibly interact with each other and adapt to external pressures. Thus, in its dual role, international law provides the building blocks of interaction, playing a crucial role before the need to ‘regulate’ interaction even appears.

Publicly funded international organizations have traditionally been cautious in engaging with the private sector. This contribution will study the different types of relationships of Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance – as a quasi-international organization – with the private sector. As illustrated, they are multi-faceted and relatively advanced. It will assess how the different types of interactions with the private sector have evolved over time and operate in practice. The contribution will also touch on how intergovernmental organizations that are members of the Alliance engage with the private sector as part of Gavi-funded activities. Some of those are complementary while for others intergovernmental organizations and private sector entities can be considered as alternatives.