'Happily ever after': Authority and legitimacy of international organizations in the process of treaty monitoring

When states accede to international treaties, they take on political and legal obligations. Signing and ratifying the treaty is like the bright day of marriage: vows and promises are cemented by a legal obligation in the face of a community. The promises however do not guarantee a happy life ever after: the implementation of treaties is often selective, delayed, superficial, or deficient in other ways. States can therefore task international organizations (IOs) with monitoring the implementation of the treaty. The delegation of the compliance check to the IO makes sense for political and organizational reasons, but practically it means that a small group of experts is called to assess legislation, policy, and practices of sovereign state in light of the treaty, and claim from these states to respect their conclusions and comply with their suggestions. The inadequacy of this task and the resources the IOs possess to fulfill it has prompted social scientists to scrutinize the IOs’ and their treaty bodies’ authority vis-à-vis the states. This paper claims that the process of the treaty monitoring itself – a sustained interaction between the IO, the governments and other stakeholders – is a major source of the treaty bodies’ authority and that they can strategically strengthen this authority by deploying different legitimation techniques. It proceeds, first, by relating different types of IOs’ authority and sources of international rules’ compliance pull with the self-legitimating techniques the organizations use to obtain social acceptance and prove efficiency to the community and the individual parties (states). This step requires a combination of insights from the international relations (Barnett and Finnemore, 2004; Franck, 1988) and the sociology of organizations (Suchman, 1995). While some combinations appear organic (moral authority and moral legitimacy), others require more elaboration (rational-legal authority and cognitive legitimacy). Second, the paper discusses how the IOs can use the process of treaty monitoring to improve the efficiency of the legitimating techniques. I claim that the authority of treaty bodies can be and is cultivated within the monitoring process, and is not solely exogenously generated in the socio-institutional environment and then imported into the monitoring. For instance, when internationally recognized experts are included in a treaty body, they “import” legitimacy to it. With time, however, they sustain and enhance the expert authority of the treaty body internally by accumulating issue- and country-specific expertise and developing coherent treaty-specific standards of data collection and assessment. And third, the paper illustrates the presented mechanisms by using the example of the monitoring of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities by the Council of Europe - a relatively new (from 1998) monitoring process relying on the regular submission of state reports on the implementation of the Convention, and state visits. What results is a fuller account of the agency the IOs have in relation to the states.