Reinisch, August --- "Privileges and Immunities" [2011] ELECD 522; in Klabbers, Jan; Wallendahl, Åsa (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of International Organizations" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2011)

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of International Organizations

Editor(s): Klabbers, Jan; Wallendahl, Åsa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847201355

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: Privileges and Immunities

Author(s): Reinisch, August

Number of pages: 24

Extract:

6 Privileges and immunities
August Reinisch*



INTRODUCTION

International organizations have always been endowed with broad privileges
and immunities vis-à-vis national law and domestic courts, enabling them to
carry out their tasks in an independent fashion. This functional necessity ratio-
nale for a preferential treatment (compared to ordinary subjects within a
national legal order) has long dominated the debate and has rarely been ques-
tioned by courts or other decision-makers. Only the increased reach of activi-
ties of international organizations coupled with a heightened rights-awareness
of those who might be (negatively) affected by broad privileges and immuni-
ties of international organizations has triggered questions about the legitimacy
of sweeping privileges and, in particular, often absolute immunity from
domestic jurisdiction. Emphasis shifted from the need to fully `emancipate'
international organizations and establish them as subjects of international law,
to which functionalism vigorously contributed, to the necessity to `embed'
those new subjects of international law in the broader framework of interna-
tional and partly national law, i.e. to make them subject to the law, which
reflects an important strand of `constitutionalist' thinking about international
organizations.
This contribution will briefly delineate the development of privileges and
immunities of international organizations; focus on the way how the rather
uniform standard of `functional' immunity has been applied in practice and
will try to assess the importance of functionalist and constitutionalist
approaches to the field.


THE EVOLUTION OF PRIVILEGES AND IMMUNITIES

Since the early times of international cooperation in the form of institutional
...