Conference: Practical Legal Problems of International Organizations

The Department of Public International Law and International Organization at the University of Geneva Law School and the New York University Institute for International Law and Justice, together with the Swiss Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, and the Institute for Research on Public Administration of Rome, are sponsoring a conference on "Practical Legal Problems of International Organizations: A Global Administrative Law Perspective on Public/Private Partnerships, Accountability, and Human Rights." The conference will take place in Geneva, March 20-21, 2009. An overview and program is available here. Here's the idea:

The purpose of the meeting is to raise, analyze, and discuss important operational issues that confront major international organizations (IOs) that may not as yet have been sufficiently addressed in systematic fashion. In order to do so, the conference will bring together leading experts – both practitioners and academics – in the field.

IOs are today confronted with new challenges as they operate in new ways, connected to development of “new public management” and other organizational changes. They increasingly use partnerships with private and civil society entities. They produce a growing set of non-treaty standards, guidelines, policies, and many other different kinds of “norms”. They frequently take, or should be able to consider taking, emergency actions that have an important impact on individuals or third parties, giving rise to accountability, liability and immunities issues. They conduct many field operations, involving civil society and million of lives; and the increase of activities has produced huge growth and differentiation in their field offices. All of these have important consequences for the relations between IOs and host-States, and between IOsʼ HQ and field offices; and they also have relevant human rights implications, relating both to the growing number of IOs (and their activities) in the field of human rights protection, and the problem of the abuse or violation of human rights law committed by officers of IOs or their contractors.