The UK has announced that, next June, the G8 Summit will be held in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh. This will probably be the most powerful international meeting ever to be held on the island. Coming during a period that sees Ireland’s Presidency of the OSCE, Ireland holding the Presidency of the EU Council, the G8 Foreign Ministers meeting(…)
Several recent high-profile elections such as Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma as Chair of the African Union, Christine Lagarde as Managing Director of the IMF, Fatou Bensouda as Chief Prosecutor at the ICC as well as Margaret Chan at at the World Health Organisation, Irina Bokova at UNESCO and the candidacy of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the World Bank, suggests progress has been(…)
Jim Yong Kim will be the next President of the World Bank. Two aspects of his appointment are interesting, first his expertise is in health and second the fact he was not born in the United States. While neither of these facts on their own are striking in the context of the World Bank they(…)
While, there probably has never been a year that has not been ‘interesting’ for modern international law, the past twelve months has seen several developments which were entirely unpredicted this time last year. This post aims to give a general overview of the various developments in international law over the past year. While significant events(…)
The time of year has come around again, when speeches are made to the world via the UN General Assembly and the IMF and World Bank have their annual meetings in Washington D.C.. We have covered these speeches previously here and Darren has covered the most pressing issue before the UN, Palestinian statehood, here. This(…)
There has been quite an amount of coverage of the wrangling behind the choice of the new Director General of the International Monetary Fund. The choice for the top job, which up to the present has always gone to a European, has generally not attracted too much attention. The same could be said of the World Bank, where an(…)
She strutted in larkish delight, calling to others less splendid, “How do yez like me now?” [1] Today is the 95th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising, and of the publication of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, chiefly (for good or ill) remembered as a declaration of resolve to ‘cherish all the children of(…)
Given Ireland’s recent re-acquaintance with the IMF I thought some reading on the historical development of the IMF may be useful. Andreas Lowenfeld of NYU Law School has written a recent piece on the evolution of the IMF in the Journal of International Economic Law. In the article he very clearly sets out the original(…)
On Thursday last, the IMF announced that the Executive Board had approved Ireland’s loan of €22.5 Billion. I have already posted on the structure of the IMF here while Darren has discussed the legal implications of the acceptance of a loan here and here. According to Dominique Strauss Kahn, Managing Director of the IMF and(…)
Recession affects men and women, but not always in the same ways or to the same degree. Often, the effects of recession on women as a class are more severe than the effects of recession on men. When governments enact policies which fail to take account of how the ‘pain’ of economic collapse is distributed(…)
