Institutional Sanctions and Functionalism: Insights from the Most Recent Practice

The article aims to discuss the most recent practice of institutional sanctions in light of contested fundamentals of the law of International Organizations (ios). The analysis delves, in particular, into sanctions adopted by ios having technical mandates in situations of wider political disputes among members, concerning international peace and security issues, amidst the United Nations (UN) Security Council’s failure to take coercive measures under Chapter vii of the UN Charter. Of special interest is the suspension of membership rights and privileges which some technical ios have deliberated following the conflict in Syria and the undergoing war in Ukraine (para. 2). These instances offer a test bed to challenge the fundamental theoretical paradigm of the law of ios, that is functionalism, and to extract some ambiguities underlying the essence of ios, revealing the continuous oscillation between policy and technocracy, which is endemic to the institutional life of every io and is well reflected in the different attitudes of the members and the Secretariats. The article highlights, in particular, the tension between politics and law that emerges from the adoption of sanctions by ios endowed with highly technical tasks (para. 3), the invocation of the ‘politicisation’ mantra by the targeted member to oppose the application of the privative measures (para. 4), and the ambivalent use of functionalist ‘language’ within the reacting io (para. 5). The article concludes with some final remarks on the ‘strategic’ use of ios (para. 6).