About

Oxford International Organizations (OXIO) is a database of annotated documents pertaining to the law of international organizations. The database is a unique and important repository, and the first of its kind, for acts and practices of international organizations which are of central importance to enquiries into international law, including international institutional law, and which have never been consolidated in one single tool.

OXIO provides practitioners, scholars, and students with instant access to classic as well as less familiar, but equally as important, materials on the law of international organizations. The database, with its expert analysis, allows researchers to search and browse across the full range of organizations enabling comparative research across a wide range of organizations and the drilling down into particular subjects with sophisticated browsing functionality. Powered by the Oxford Law Citator, OXIO greatly enables research as it permits users to follow citations and other links between content.

OXIO is the first database for analysing and understanding key documents of international organizations. It aims to capture the full bearing of international organizations on various substantive areas of international law as well as on the field of international institutional law in particular. OXIO includes, but is not limited to, resolutions and decisions of organizations, draft normative texts prepared within the framework of organizations, and constituent instruments of organizations. It also contains court decisions relevant for the institutional law of organizations as well as, occasionally, a treaty to which an organization is a party, where this brings light to issues of institutional law. Until now, there has been no such collection of documents spanning all organizations and areas of international law. OXIO is constantly updated with the latest documents and acts of international organizations.

Within OXIO, ‘international organization’ – according to a received working definition – refers to an intergovernmental organization established between states or other international legal actors by a treaty or other instrument possessing at least some permanence of structure. ‘Non-governmental organizations’ (NGOs) are excluded from the scope of OXIO. Yet, OXIO takes into account the fringes of the intergovernmental category so defined. Thus, a document of the G20 (an intergovernmental platform usually thought to fall outside the traditional definition of an ‘international organization’) could be relevant for an OXIO headnote. The same holds for a document pertaining to a ‘public-private partnership’ where the private party-component would preclude it from qualifying as a traditional ‘international organization’.

Each document is accompanied by a concise expert commentary, which, among other things, commonly include: the impact of the document or act concerned on the internal working of the organization in question, on the development of the law of international organizations generally, and on the development of international law as a whole.

The database is continuously expanding with new materials to give researchers a full overview of the legal frameworks, processes, and impact of a growing range of organizations.

For comments and suggestions, you can contact the editorial team by email at ContactOXIOEditors@oup.com.