LCIL Friday Lecture: Speaking law to power: the UN and the vertical and the horizontal dimension of the international rule of law' by Prof Catherine Brölmann

Lecture summary: In the years after the Cold War, ‘the rule of law’ made a rapid appearance in the political and legal discourse of the United Nations. The UN has become a rule of law advocate, and is making a declared effort to coordinate and initiate “rule of law activities.” The late Kofi Annan in 2004 famously defined the rule of law as relevant for “all persons, institutions and entities, public and private, including the State itself,“ and from further reports it is clear that the UN’s ambitions are geared to both “the national and the international level.” This said, it seems the Organisation frequently struggles to conceptualise and capture the international rule of law in concrete programmes and statements. The lecture traces this fact to the vertical and the horizontal dimension of the international rule of law, that exist in parallel as two –implicit- frames of reference. An exploration of this facet can help unpack the UN’s promise as a caretaker of the ‘communal’ or ‘public’ space of international law.

Catherine Brölmann is an associate professor of law at the University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam Center for International Law. She is a member of the Advisory Committee for  Public International Law of the Netherlands Government. She is co-editor-in-chief of the OUP online Oxford International Organizations (OXIO) (with Jean d’Aspremont and Iain Scobie). Her publications on international organisations include The Institutional Veil in Public International Law: International Organisations and the Law of Treaties, (Oxford , Hart, 2007); 'Specialized Rules of Treaty Interpretation: International Organizations’,  in D Hollis (ed), The Oxford Guide to Treaties (OUP 2012), 507-524 – revised chapter for second edition (2019, forthcoming); “Member States and International Legal Responsibility: Developments of the Institutional Veil”, 12 (2015) International Organizations Law Review 358-381; "International organizations as willfull actors in international law" in J d’Aspremont and S Droubi (eds), International Organizations and the Formation of Customary International Law  (Manchester, MUP, 2018, forthcoming).

The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press. 

A sandwich lunch is available for all attendees from 12.30 pm in the Old Library.

Numbers are limited so please arrive early to avoid disappointment. Please note the lecture programme is subject to revision without notice.