UNITY, DIVERSITY, ACCOUNTABILITY: THE AMBIVALENT CONCEPT OF INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION

This article explores the concept of international organisation, starting from the observation that many of these entities seem to exist and that few seem to be alike. This raises issues of cognition: how to establish whether an entity is indeed an international organisation? The question is all the more relevant in light of the suggestion, sometimes heard, that international law ought to treat different (groups of) organisations in different ways. Having first established the enormous variety of international organisations in existence, the article presents an overview of attempts by international institutional lawyers to differentiate between organisations, followed by an excursion into the relevant judicial decisions. Whereas the literature remains content with discussing formal characteristics, the courts suggest that a public task is one of the core elements of international organisation. This discrepancy is further discussed and it is concluded that the law of international organisations cannot include a public task as an essential element of the concept of international organisation, as this criterion is too fluid and too general to be of much use. In the end, the discipline cannot but uphold a single formalistic conceptualisation of international organisation.