Edited by Megan Bradley (McGill University, Montréal), Cathryn Costello (University of Oxford), Angela Sherwood (Queen Mary University of London), IOM Unbound? Obligations and Accountability of the International Organization for Migration in an Era of Expansion is newly published by Cambridge University Press.
This edited collection brings together contributions from legal scholars and political scientists to clarify and assess the obligations (political and legal) of an understudied international organisation, the International Organization for Migration (IOM), now self-styled as ‘the UN Migration agency’, in fact a UN-related entity. The volume makes significant contributions to the study of International Organisation accountability generally, and to scholarship on the global governance of migration.
Contributors include leading legal scholars on international organisations (Professor Helmut Philipp Aust, Freie Universität Berlin; Professor Jan Klabbers, University of Helsinki; Dr Stian Øby Johansen, University of Oslo) and political scientists with expertise on IOs (Professor Christian Kreuder-Sonnen, Friedrich Schiller University Jena, Professor Nina Hall, Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies).
Chapters also assess IOM’s legal and political obligations in underexplored aspects of its activities, including fair recruitment (Professor Janie Chuang, American University Washington College of Law); internal displacement (Dr Bríd Ní Ghráinne and Dr Ben Hudson); and its engagement with international humanitarian law in conflict scenarios (Professor Geoff Gilbert, University of Essex).
Professor Costello’s chapter (with Dr Angela Sherwood and Isabelle Lemay) reconsiders IOM’s practices and obligations around immigration detention, a field in which it has enabled massive human rights violations (aiding in the establishment of Australian offshore detention) to its current position ostensibly seeking to limit states’ recourse to immigration detention.