Steinbrueck-Platise: Legitimate Governance as a Privilege and Price for the Autonomy of International Organisations

Mateja Steinbrueck-Platise (Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law) has posted Legitimate Governance as a Privilege and Price for the Autonomy of International Organisations (in The Legal Framework of the OSCE, Mateja Steinbrück Platise, Carolyn Moser, & Anne Peters eds., forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This paper addresses the legitimacy crisis of the OSCE beyond the well-rehearsed political debates between the participating States as to the OSCE’s institutional form, functions and structure, and situates it instead in a broader context of global governance, analysing it from the international institutional law and human rights law perspective. In a first step, the concept of autonomy is introduced as one essential element of legal personality of international organizations, but still broader in scope in that it can be identified also with organizations lacking legal personality. Since the autonomy of an organization gives rise to certain legitimate expectations as to its purpose, functioning and outcomes, some of the legitimacy standards typically appertaining to the organizations with legal personality become relevant also with respect to other international organizations, including the OSCE. In a second step, in order to assess competing efforts of participating States to justify the OSCE’s legitimacy, the paper contextualises these efforts within the global trend of questioning the legitimacy of international organizations in general. Such an approach reveals not only certain reform proposals common to various international organizations, but also, and in particular, the lack of certain proposals within the OSCE that would aim towards strengthening the OSCE’s legal framework in terms of good governance. Finally, the contribution sketches out some of the legitimacy standards that call for a reform of a range of international organizations, with the OSCE being a prime example. However, this rising normative framework applies to organizations not because they might possess international legal personality or be established by a constitutive treaty, but because they have the capacity to autonomously exercise public power over individuals and peoples at large.