KENNETH ANDERSON: Agency Failure, Legal Liability and Jurisdiction, and International Organizations.
On occasion, I have lamented what I perceive as the lack of due attention in the scholarly literature to the actual circumstances of international organizations, starting with the UN. One of those fundamental issues concerns accountability, in the special sense that there is no obvious judicial forum for reviewing actions even of individuals alleged to have engaged in serious misconduct, such as fraud, embezzlement, etc.
On the one hand, the treaties put the organizations and their civil servants beyond the reach of national courts. On their face, they seem to leave at most, in some cases, the often highly unlikely possibility of a prosecution or civil action in the person’s national jurisdiction. Given the politics, let alone the legal questions, home jurisdiction prosecution of one’s own nationals is out of reach in many if not nearly all cases. On the other hand, such accountability as supposedly exists rests in various internal review processes. These internal review processes vacillate, however, between being tools by which senior managers are able to punish whistleblowers and so protect themselves or their underlings or their national confreres or what have you; or else being captured by the other side of the process through what amounts (in my jaundiced view, admittedly) to the world’s strongest public employee union.
It’s not really surprising that legal academics find it hard to get too interested in the hard material facts of UN budgets and fiscal accounting — although as Marx often advised, follow the money. But it is more surprising to me that so little attention has been paid to the legal issues involved in the accountability-jurisidiction questions.
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