1.5 Legal Personality of International Organizations

The doctrine's fountain: the Reparations for Injuries Suffered in the Service of the United Nations advisory opinion (1949 — the Bernadotte case): the UN possesses objective international personality — the capacity to bear rights and duties on the international plane, derived from the Charter's purposes and functions, opposable even to non-members. The consequences: treaty-making capacity (the organisation's agreements), privileges and immunities (the General Convention 1946 for the UN; the 1947 Specialized Agencies Convention; headquarters agreements — functional necessity's logic), responsibility (the organisation answers for its organs' acts — the law of IO responsibility's modern codification by the ILC), claim- resentation (the Reparations holding itself: the UN could claim for its injured agent), and domestic legal personality (to hold property, sue and be sued in national courts — conferred by domestic law and the agreements). The personality is derived and functional: bounded by the constituent treaty — neither super-state nor mere committee.