The State’s Right to Withdraw from International Organizations: A Restricted Account

Withdrawals from international organizations are nothing new; indeed, just as states create international organizations, they also, although to a lesser extent, either individually withdraw or dismantle organizations altogether. That said, it seems that the frequency of withdrawals is getting higher in recent years. Think of the UK’s exit from the EU; the US’s withdrawal from several treaties and organizations including the Paris Climate Change Agreement, UNESCO and the UN Human Rights Council; or Burundi’s and Philippines’ withdrawal from the Statute of the ICC that might be followed by at least two more African states. Even though it is recognized that such trends have negative implications for the existing multilateral cooperation (Kupchan 2014; Brölmann et al. 2018; cf. Ikenberry 2018), the dominant view seems to be that states, as sovereign entities are free to exercise their right to withdraw from treaties and organizations. The main idea is that just as states voluntarily create new treaties and international organizations, or join the existing ones, they are free to leave these too. To be sure, it is frequently the case that they need to negotiate their withdrawal with the remaining state members, but there seem to be unquestioned assumption that states do have a right to withdraw; all that is subject to negotiations are the conditions of withdrawal, rather than whether or not they can withdraw at all. When we think about the state’s right to withdraw from international organizations, we need to distinguish between a legal and moral right to withdraw. While international lawyers have been considering the existence and scope of a legal right to exit (Athanassiou 2009; Brölmann et al. 2018.), philosophers have paid far less attention to the moral right to exit. This is unwarranted given that the existence and the nature of the putative right are far from obvious. To begin with, what kind of right is the state’s moral right to withdraw? It seems important to identify whether this is, in Hohfeldian terms, a claim right or simple liberty since we need to know what kind of duties for others, if any, it entails (Hohfeld 1917; Thomson 1990). Moreover, we also need to know what and whose interest the state’s right to exit protects. It seems broadly accepted that the state has the right to decide on its external commitments which is derivative from the more fundamental collective right to self-determination, but how to decide in cases in which the exercise of the collective right limits individuals’ right to self-determination? This suggests that the state’s right to exit, contrary to a common understanding, is not absolute and there are limits to it. In this paper, I aim to clarify the nature of the state’s putative right to withdraw from international organizations, its moral justification as well as possible grounds for its restrictions. The main although the tentative claim is that the state's moral right to withdraw from international treaties and organizations is more restricted than it is standardly assumed.