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Outsourcing Enforcement, Desiree Leclercq

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International organizations often outsource the enforcement of international law to their member states. The International Labor Organization (ILO), for instance, has neither its own adjudicative body nor an internal system of sanctions. Instead, the ILO’s maritime rules authorize states to impose costly retributive measures against noncompliant states. Conventional scholars are optimistic that these kinds of authorizations will strengthen otherwise toothless international law. During the COVID-19 pandemic, however, states neither followed nor enforced the ILO’s rules, harming hundreds of thousands of seafarers in the process.

Where has international law gone wrong? Challenging the conventional view, this Article unearths the state-centric drawbacks …