James5

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Over the winter I visited Geneva for two weeks studying Institutions in International Law, this post is part of a series on what I learnt and thought about the institutions we visited. See them all here. The job of the Secretariat of an international institution is to provide administrative support to the institution. This means it provides information, studies and research to allow the institution to carry on its functions, organises the conferences and meetings of the Members, consults with Members, helps to resolve disputes, and sometimes provides assistance for Members who need it. Some Secretariats are well-known and relatively interventionist, the WTO and UN Secretariats come to mind as high-profile bodies who drive a great deal of policy making and action within their institutions. For example, the UN Secretary-General, under Kofi Annan, produced the Peoples’ Report in 2000 which ultimately led to the Millennium Declaration. There’s debate over the autonomy given to some Secretariats, whether they should be allowed to actively pursue their own agenda or should be restrained by the Members’ wishes. This obviously raises issues of accountability and good governance if an unelected Secretariat is shaping and pushing the agenda of an institution. Perhaps one of the crucial most roles for the Secretariat, however, is to act as the ‘institutional memory’ of an international institution. Whereas, Member representatives may come and go, the Secretariat’s staff is relatively stable. It is the Secretariat who know the procedure and how things work. They know intimately the history of an organisation, what is realistic and what is unachievable. This role is critical to the proper functioning of any institution. What the Secretariat does ultimately demonstrate, is that these institutions are more then just the some of their Members. That they aren’t just forums for discussion and negotiation of certain issues. Rather they are actors in their own right, and who is in charge can make a real difference to the direction and results of the work of the institution.

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Anti-terrorism has given rise to some interesting companies. Including Terrogence a private Israeli company that infiltrates terrorist groups to obtain intelligence on terrorist groups. They can then sell this information to governments and other companies. It sounds like a dangerous line of work, especially balancing the fine line between the legal and illegal.

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Opinio Juris is always a good port of call to find analysis of international law issues. They’ve got some good posts on the recent situation in Georgia. Well worth a read to get a quick overview of some of the issues.

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International politics is a strange world, for example the connection between Rwanda and Georgia. Russian peace-keepers ended up in South-Ossetia due to a compromise reached when trying to get peace-keepers into Rwanda.

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Over the winter I visited Geneva for two weeks studying Institutions in International Law, this post is part of a series on what I learnt and thought about the institutions we visited. See them all here.

UNESCO is the United Nations Education, Science and Cultural Organisation. It was instituted to:

contribute to peace and security by promoting international collaboration through education, science, and culture in order to further universal respect for justice, the rule of law, and the human rights and fundamental freedoms proclaimed in the UN Charter.

So they do a range of difference things from promoting literacy, to registering cultural heritage sites, to improving the freedom of the press.

UNESCO is one of the older international institutions, established in 1946 and carrying on from the work of League of Nations’ International Commission on Intellectual Cooperation.

What I found most interesting about the presentation we heard on UNESCO was the increasing work they do in fields such as development. Encouraging increased literacy is a good example of this. While UNESCO was designed with a wide, almost vague, mission - it seems that their modern work covers an extremely wide range of fields. Human rights, development, cultural heritage. Not only does this mean UNESCO has a lot to do, within a constrained budget, but it also means there’s overlap with the work of agenices such as the UNDP, UNICEFs, and NGOs and government.

Sure a ‘holistic’ view of their work is important when you consider what UNESCO does, but I worry that this expanding ‘mission creep’ is not in the best interest of UNESCO, the people being helped or other groups doing development. What’s wrong with a bit of specialisation?

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