Publication of the article “ In What Sense Are International Organizations ‘Public’? A Plea for a Public International Law of Organization ” by Prof. Samantha Besson in the Leiden Journal of International Law .
Excerpt
The privatization of the rights and obligations of states under the influence of international organizations (IOs) poses a challenge for international law. The difficulty lies in the lack of a clear public status for these organizations. This article seeks to identify an “international public law” applicable to both states and IOs. Only such a law could truly establish international organizations as “public” institutions of their member states’ peoples and thereby “reinstate” those peoples. The article’s first section presents an institutional-normative account of publicness. A second section explains how, even though an international law “of the public” gradually developed after the nineteenth century, that public dimension was never very strong—not least because of the role played by IOs. The third section explains how, due to the construction of IOs as functional and apolitical organizations and the private law analogies that have dominated their organization, the international law of IOs quickly became a vehicle for the hybridization of the public and private spheres in both states and IOs. To address this challenge, the fourth section argues not only for a general and minimal common public status for IOs under international law, but also against hasty analogies with states’ sovereign rights and obligations. To help consolidate the proposed distinct yet continuous public status of IOs, the fifth section outlines what could constitute the common but differentiated public rights of states and IOs—rights that may not be conferred upon private individuals—as well as their common but differentiated public obligations, which could set limits on the private exercise of these rights.
Besson, S., “In What Sense Are International Organizations ‘Public’? A Plea for a Public International Law of Organizations,” (2026) 39(2) Leiden Journal of International Law 1–20.
