Friday, November 8, 2013

Samuel: The OIC, the UN, and Counter-Terrorism Law-Making: Conflicting or Cooperative Legal Orders?

Katja LH Samuel (Univ. of Reading - Law) has published The OIC, the UN, and Counter-Terrorism Law-Making: Conflicting or Cooperative Legal Orders? (Hart Publishing 2013). Here's the abstract:

The increasingly transnational nature of terrorist activities compels the international community to strengthen the legal framework in which counter-terrorism activities should occur at every level, including that of intergovernmental organizations.

This unique, timely, and carefully researched monograph examines one such important yet generally under-researched and poorly understood intergovernmental organization, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation ('OIC', formerly the Organization of the Islamic Conference). In particular, it analyses in depth its institutional counter-terrorism law-making practice, and the relationship between resultant OIC law and comparable UN norms in furtherance of UN Global Counter-Terrorism Stategy goals. Furthermore, it explores two common (mis)assumptions regarding the OIC, namely whether its internal institutional weaknesses mean that its law-making practice is inconsequential at the intergovernmental level; and whether its self-declared Islamic objectives and nature are irrelevant to its institutional practice or are instead reflected within OIC law.

Where significant normative tensions are discerned between OIC law and UN law, the monograph explores not only whether these may be explicable, at least in part, by the OIC's Islamic nature, and objectives, but also whether their corresponding institutional legal orders are conflicting or cooperative in nature, and the resultant implications of these findings for international counter-terrorism law- and policy-making.