Dupuy, Pierre-Marie --- "Conclusion: Return on the Legal Status of NGOs and on the Methodological Problems which Arise for Legal Scholarship" [2008] ELECD 151; in Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa (eds), "NGOs in International Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: NGOs in International Law

Editor(s): Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847205605

Section Title: Conclusion: Return on the Legal Status of NGOs and on the Methodological Problems which Arise for Legal Scholarship

Author(s): Dupuy, Pierre-Marie

Number of pages: 12

Extract:

Conclusion: return on the legal status of
NGOs and on the methodological
problems which arise for legal
scholarship
Pierre-Marie Dupuy
In international law, NGOs remain legal objects which are difficult to appre-
hend. Neither subjects, nor objects, actors nonetheless! Neither even always
formally recognized, which is to say possessing the status of observer at an
international organization. NGOs irritate classical legal scholarship and worry
states whose actions they watch and exactions they denounce.
NGOs are multiform, ambitious but also ambiguous. Some of them, the
largest and better known, such as Amnesty International, the International
Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) or Greenpeace, have been part of the
landscape for some time. Their leaders, although they still retain a certain taste
for contestation, aim at making it smoother. They more willingly comply with
the rules of an international diplomacy of which they have become an essen-
tial part.
Others have more narrowly defined goals and limited means, but are
nonetheless active in providing expertise, disseminating information or carry-
ing out missions, humanitarian or other, at a more or less local level, depend-
ing on the situations. Others still show a capacity for stonewalling that reveals
them for what they really are: groups created by states but disguised as NGOs,
as a kind of mask for the counter-propaganda organized with more or less
subtlety by those that the real human rights organizations regularly denounce
for their repeated violation of their obligations.1 It is thus important, here as
anywhere else, to ...