This chapter makes a general argument, equally applicable (mutatis mutandis) to the IOM as to the World Bank, or the World Health Organization or even the European University Institute. While it is arguable that the IOM has no strong humanitarian mission, this circumstance alone is unlikely to affect its legal accountability – the problems with accountability of international organizations under international law go much, much deeper. Legal accountability (not quite a term of art perhaps) is conceptualized as utilizing a (more or less) legal mechanism to test the acts of an international organizations against (more or less) legal standards. This may be done before a court, but may also involve internal accountability mechanisms. Those standards, in turn, do not simply comprise the entire corpus of international law, but are limited, it is generally agreed, to the treaties that international organizations are parties to, to international legal rules that have become internalized, and to the ‘general rules of international law’. There is consensus that this is an authoritative enumeration, but precious little agreement on what this entails

This chapter assesses the contribution of the ICJ to the law of international organisations. It emphasises the limited role of the Court in this field, setting out the multiple reasons for this: parts of the law were developed before the Court commenced its work; and the Court has only had intermittent opportunities to consider it through its cases. The author argues that the Court’s approach reflects a more general ambivalence of classic international law when it comes to international institutions: that it emphasises the centrality of States in the international legal system, notwithstanding the steps that have been taken by States to institutionalise significant areas of international law.

Over the last decade or so, international lawyers have started to pay some attention to the role of experts in international decision-making processes (both EU and other international organisations), focusing on the identity of experts, their disciplinary backgrounds, how seemingly neutral expertise helps shape policy, and to what extent (if at all) experts can be held accountable. Perhaps surprisingly, while much attention is devoted to the role of economists, engineers, and scientists, little attention is paid to international legal academics as experts. And yet, without conceit, it is possible to argue that international law scholars too may come to affect the world around them, precisely in their professional, expert capacities: through their research and publications, through their peer activities (reviewer, board member), and through their teaching. Using the notion of epistemic governance and framing expertise as a power to tell stories, this chapter zooms in on the influence exercised by international law academics as experts influencing policy-processes, discussing in particular those aspects of influence that usually go unnoticed.

The author discusses the responsibility of International Organizations under international law. With the help of two case studies (the proposed relocation of a refugee camp involving the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a water project involving, amongst others, the World Bank), the chapter discusses three central elements of international responsibility: obligation, attribution and causation. It concludes that, often enough, allegations concerning the responsibility of international organizations owe much to opportunism. Since the current legal regime is not very helpful, responsibility claims flow like water: they flow wherever they can, relatively independent from obligation, attribution and causation.

In one of the splendid essays brought together in his Personality in Politics, published just after World War II, British politician and civil servant Sir Arthur Salter speculates about why the USA failed to ratify the League of Nations Covenant, the brainchild of US President Woodrow Wilson. First, Sir Arthur suggests, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, a one-time supporter of the idea behind the League, was embroiled in “bitter personal enmity” with Wilson, for reasons that have long remained unclear. Sir Arthur suggests that Lodge’s support could have made a decisive difference: it would most likely have resulted in further support by seven more senators, which would have been enough to secure the required two-thirds majority in the US Senate. But the personal relationship between Lodge and Wilson was such that this never happened.

The intellectual historian John Pocock once observed that with the rise of commercialization, the status of citizens was no longer seen as a function of their actions and their virtues but came to be constructed in juridical terms, in terms of rights and of ownership of things. He posits an opposition between virtue (part of a political way of life) and rights (part of a commercial way of life) that was eventually bridged with the help of the social notion of manners – and this might help explain why we associate the virtue of prudence with a certain kind of prudishness.

An additional role the virtues can play involves helping to evaluate (and thereby possibly even guide) conduct. It is here in particular that responsibility or accountability mechanisms often come up short or can at least be said to be naturally limited. Typically, such mechanisms focus on single instances of conduct, divorced from what preceded or inspired them, or then conduct might be such that it can hardly be caught by rules. Some have pleaded strongly for “intelligent accountability,” but the combination of having rules and organs or agents to apply and enforce them as they relate to particular facts makes such an idea well-nigh impossible. In the typical accountability scheme, the act under review usually gets simplified and stylized. This has heuristic benefits in that it simplifies what actually goes on, but these benefits may come at the cost of proper understanding.

It is not too difficult to claim, in a cocktail party type of way, that global governance should be more virtuous, and that those who run our lives and our institutions should be decent human beings. That is the easy part, if only because it makes intuitive sense that what could possibly be useful in some settings (professional sports, for example) is not so appropriate in other settings. We accept ruthlessness in our professional athletes – indeed, to the point that it might be difficult for them to become truly exceptional without a ruthless streak. But we do not think that quite the same applies to judges, or high-ranking civil servants, let alone religious leaders. Not even our statespersons, even if we would want them to serve the national interest (whatever that may be), are expected to display quite the same amount or sort of ruthlessness. Michael Jordan and Cristiano Ronaldo may be single-minded and ruthless; the Dalai Lama or the Pope may not, and neither may Germany’s long-serving prime minister Angela Merkel.

As the preceding chapters have suggested, there might be merit in paying some attention to the virtues when discussing global governance, both in the abstract and in highly concrete manifestations. Those merits can come in various forms and guises, and can probably be grouped neatly together under three headings. First, the virtues can have some explanatory force: they can help us to understand things we would otherwise be unable to grasp. They can help us understand why Finland’s wartime president Risto Ryti made his “personal” deal with Nazi Germany, or why Sergio Vieira de Mello decided to persuade Cambodian refugees to return to their country of origin.

One cannot open a newspaper these days without some ethical issue being mentioned, often rather prominently so. Sometimes this concerns business ethics: the most debated scandal of 2015, for instance, was the way a car manufacturer had aimed to circumvent emission standards by installing doctored computer technology. What is more, this car manufacturer had done so despite the existence of legal rules on the topic, and despite the circumstance that those rules seem clear enough, if not in their detail, then at least in what they aim to prevent.

While virtue ethics is distinguished from deontology and consequentialism by its focus on the actor and their character rather than specific acts, it can nonetheless be illuminating to analyze particular acts through a virtue ethics prism. Such an analysis may be helpful in coming to understand why, in a specific situation, the actor came to their act. The point here is not so much to appraise the act and assess whether it was good or bad but rather whether the act can be made understandable – and perhaps justifiable – in light of the circumstances of the case and the agent’s character. Put differently, and perhaps more accurately, the idea underlying what follows is that their conduct tells us something about the individual concerned and simultaneously suggests how difficult situations can be approached – atypical though they may be. Much conduct is hemmed in by the context in which it takes place, and thus there is little point in copying other people’s conduct. But it may be possible to draw broader lessons from looking at specific situations and how people responded.

The virtues may not only be inspiring or exemplarist in the way discussed in the previous chapter but may also help define or circumscribe what can be expected from persons in particular positions. If it is true that being an accountant entails different things from being a doctor, it may (or must) be possible to provide at least a rough description of the position in terms of the virtues. And this, in turn, can be achieved by looking at various occupants of a position and distilling what is worthy of emulation and what is best not repeated. This is a difficult task in that circumstances are rarely the same – a positive and definitive job description, valid for all times and situations, will not be possible. But what might be possible is to provide a rough description – things to pay attention to when appointing individuals and monitoring their performance.