NGOs under European Convention on Human Rights / Tymofeyeva

CHAPTER I THE NOTION ‘NON-GOVERNMENTAL ORGANISATION’

NGOs are usually understood to be ‘third sector’, not-for-profit organizations … David Lewis 23

1.1 General definition of ‘NGO’ in international law 1.1.1 Doctrine of international law

The theory of international law has elaborated a number of approaches to understanding the concept of ‘non-governmental organisation’ and there is no generally recognised definition of ‘NGO’. 24 In this first section of the current chapter, the author would like to give a basic overview of the perspectives from which the theorists look at the term within the doctrine of international law.The short analysis given here does not aim to cover all the different approaches to the concept of ‘NGO’, but only to set forth its common elements. Accordingly, it would be possible to make a comparison of the meaning of the term ‘non-governmental organisation’ in the doctrine, in international treaties and, at the end, in the key treaty for this study, namely the European Convention on Human Rights. Famous human rights theorist, Christian Tomuschat , defines an NGO as an association under the domestic law of a given country, 25 which is a quite vague definition. It does not allow us to derivate the specific features of an NGO, except for mentioning two things. First, an NGOmust be established in accordance with the law, which would probably require formal existence of the legal entity, but not necessarily. Second, the applicable law is the national law, a contrario , not international law. The author of a ground study on the legal status of NGOs in international law, Anna-Karin Lindblom , conducted an extensive analysis of a meaning of the term ‘NGO’ in various international documents and came to conclusions that an ‘NGO’ is an organisation with the following features: 1) is ‘non-governmental’, that it is established by private initiative and free from any governmental influence, including non-performance of public functions; 2) is not-for-profit, meaning that if any profits are earned by the organisation, they are not distributed to its members, but used for the realization of its objectives; 23 LEWIS, D. Non-Governmental Organizations, Management and Development. Third Edition, David Lewis, 2014, p. 3. 24 LINDBLOM, 2005, cited above; TOMUSCHAT, C. Human Rights Between Idealism and Realism , Second Edition. Oxford: OxfordUniversityPress, 2008;WILLETTS, P. What is aNon-Governmental Organization? Output from the Research Project on Civil Society Networks in Global Governance. URL: accessed 20 July 2015. 25 TOMUSCHAT, 2008, cited above, p. 282.

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