Responsibility of International Organizations 'in connection with acts of States'

This article offers some reflections on the way in which the ILC Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (ARIO) have addressed the responsibility of international organizations for conduct of member States implementing their normative acts. The ILC has chosen to deal with this issue through the concept of responsibility ‘in connection with’ acts of States, which it had already included in its Articles on State Responsibility (ASR), and more in particular through article 17 on ‘circumvention’. Focusing primarily on this provision, we argue that the attempt to address this particular type of responsibility forced the ILC to relax the conceptual straightjackets it had opted for in the ASR, thereby exposing certain ambiguities in the foundations of the law of international responsibility.