The Internal Law of International Organisations. The Case of the OECD

Internal law (rules of procedure, staff and budget rules, etc.) is the main tool for International Organisations ( IO ) to organise themselves, striving for their smooth functioning on an everyday basis. These rules complement the IO ’s constituent act(s). Due to the institutional proliferation in most IO , providing for a multitude of specialised internal bodies, which again adopt rules for themselves, over time the body of internal law has increased in scope and complexity. Taking the example of the OECD – a comparatively old IO which has turned from a transatlantic (‘Western’) to a global actor, which over the decades has developed a complex organisational structure and which has met tasks in an ever wider array of policy fields –, this article depicts and analyses the body of its internal law in terms of its creators, the terminology applied, their incorporation, their legal (non-)bindingness, and in terms of any hierarchies established between them.