Public International Law Seminar: 'Challenging the Presumption of 'Limited Liability' of Member States of International Organisations'

The final Public International Law Seminar for this academic year will be held from 11:30-12:30 next Thursday, June 12, in the Findley Library at the Lauterpacht Centre.

Odette Murray will be presenting on 'Challenging the Presumption of "Limited Liability" of Member States of International Organisations'. A summary of her talk follows.

The relationship between an international organisation and its member states poses difficulties for the traditional rules of international responsibility, which were derived from the practice of states as sovereign and independent equals. In attempting to reflect the complex, ‘layered’ relationship between an organisation and its members, the ILC has developed a number of ideas or mechanisms – dual attribution, an obligation to finance the organisation, a prohibition on circumvention, and subsidiary liability – in the Articles on Responsibility of International Organizations (ARIO). These innovations aim to prevent states from using the institutional veil as a shield. However, the ILC has developed these rules from a particular ideological premise: that member states can never be held responsible for the wrongful acts of the organisation due solely to their membership. In the dominant narrative, this premise is the necessary consequence of the separate legal personality of the organisation. My presentation will revisit this 'limited liability' presumption, challenging intuitions about independent responsibility and the responsibility of member states. From this perspective, the ARIO tend to reinforce rather than pierce the institutional veil. While the ARIO may err on the side of limiting the liability of member states, I suggest that other rules of international law may be utilised to take account of the interests of injured third parties.