This chapter makes a general argument, equally applicable (mutatis mutandis) to the IOM as to the World Bank, or the World Health Organization or even the European University Institute. While it is arguable that the IOM has no strong humanitarian mission, this circumstance alone is unlikely to affect its legal accountability – the problems with accountability of international organizations under international law go much, much deeper. Legal accountability (not quite a term of art perhaps) is conceptualized as utilizing a (more or less) legal mechanism to test the acts of an international organizations against (more or less) legal standards. This may be done before a court, but may also involve internal accountability mechanisms. Those standards, in turn, do not simply comprise the entire corpus of international law, but are limited, it is generally agreed, to the treaties that international organizations are parties to, to international legal rules that have become internalized, and to the ‘general rules of international law’. There is consensus that this is an authoritative enumeration, but precious little agreement on what this entails

[38.1] Statutory reasonableness refers to the use in legislation of the ‘reasonableness’ standard in its various forms. The concept of statutory reasonableness may be profitably examined, taking in its general characteristics and its special interpretative aspects. The importance of examining it is underlined by the fact that, for a number of compelling reasons, it is widely used in statute law.

The common law consists of legal rules, principles, and standards. Common law legal rules are relatively specific legal norms that require actors to act or not act in a specified way, enable or disable specified types of arrangement, or set remedies for specific wrongs. In contrast, legal principles are relatively general legal norms. Because of their generality, legal principles can generate, explain, and justify legal rules, while, because of their specificity, legal rules normally cannot generate, explain, or justify either legal principles or other legal rules. And because of their specificity, most legal rules can determine cases with little or no elaboration. In contrast, most legal principles must be elaborated to determine cases. As used in the common law, the term standard has three different meanings: it may be used as a collective noun that includes all legal norms; it may be used to mean extremely general legal norms; or it may refer to legal rules that are not applicable at the time they are adopted because they are designed to be further elaborated, usually by administrative agencies.