The effects of international organizations’ rules in a pluralistic international legal order

Abstract

The main topic of this dissertation are the rules of international organizations and their categorization as internal and external. The aim is to ‘unveil’ the explanatory force of the distinction by looking into the premises of thought and the arguments that created it. International organizations are created through international law and are participants in the international legal order so in Chapter 1 basic tenets of thought on international law as a legal order are addressed to then analyze how the main doctrines of the law of international organizations, namely that of the legal personality and the legal powers of international organizations were shaped in international legal scholarship. These doctrines though reflecting the dual perception of international organizations as state driven entities and autonomous independent actors cannot fully explain the evolution of international organizations and in particular the existence of their separate legal order and thus the analysis turns to the rules of international organizations that construct it. In Chapter 2 academic writings are analyzed in 5 order to link the normative claims of authors to the categorizations of rules of international organizations they create. In Chapter 3, the arguments that influenced the work of the International Law Commission on international organizations are described to explain the categorization of rules in internal and external therein. In Chapter 4, decisions of international, regional and national courts are addressed to follow the different reasonings used by those courts when dealing with rules created by international organizations. The aim of these three Chapters is both to flesh out the meaning of internal and external and to elucidate the contours of the separate legal order. The final Chapter suggests three criteria that could be used to create a spectrum of possible positions for the rules of international organizations that would more fully encompass the practice and evolving nature of international organizations than the current dichotomous categorization, questions the theoretical foundations of the existence of the separate legal orders and argues that pluralism can have considerable explanatory force concerning the interactions of international organizations with the international legal order.

Date of Award	2 Apr 2020
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	The University of Manchester
Supervisor	Jean D'Aspremont (Main Supervisor) & Iain Scobbie (Co Supervisor)