BF2S Forums Only states are true actors of international law

HollisHurlbut wrote:

Define an "actor of international law" and we can offer an educated answer.

I'm still trying to work that one out...it's a very very vague question

A legal journal I found...pretty much answers the question...here's a little extract

international obligations are no longer limited to the formal sources of law listed in Article 38 of the ICJ Statute but embrace global forms of regulation that more closely approximate the law of the administrative
state, these obligations involve in addition to states, as both lawmaking actors andsubjects,
IOs, individuals, NGOs, multinational corporations, and networks of regulatory officials.45
IOs are surely part of the reason why, as Steve Charnovitz indicates, NGOs have joined states
as instigators and enforcers of international law.46 It is no accident that the most prominent
NGO roles in the international legal process as, for example, behind-the-scenes treaty drafters
and promoters of such contemporary global treaties as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of
the Child, the Convention Against Torture, the Statute of the International Criminal Court,
and the Ottawa convention banning land mines, or as agents of change, for instance, by backing
the establishment of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, have involved IOs.
The rise to international prominence of NGOs is necessarily the story of the symbiotic role of
their erstwhile adversaries and abettors, the IOs, from the United Nations to the WTO, that
have given them observer or consultative status, permitted them to opine as amici, or otherwise
legitimized them (as by citing their reports). IOs have also empowered (or in some cases disempowered)
other nonstate actors, including business associations, representatives of multilateral
corporations, and trade unions, by permitting or denying them access to the inner sanctum
of IO lawmaking. IO lawmaking processes, such as those producing (and enforcing) the
Codex Alimentarius, have helped to "privatize" the international legal process.47
The expansion of lawmaking actors and subjects is to be expected of institutions that are
themselves a new kind of"international legal person" that, in the words of the ICJ, are neither
equivalent nor superior to states, but, within the scope of their charters, can act as both lawmakers
and law subjects.48 Although some may prefer to describe them as merely "arenas" for
lawmaking action, IOs-whether traditional or not-are for all practical purposes a new kind
of lawmaking actor, to some degree autonomous from the states that establish them.49 IOs can
now be seen not only as capable of concluding treaties with other international legal persons
(other IOs or states) but as vehicles for the forms of regulation associated with the executive
branches of government or national administrative agencies-and not just in technocratic
fields of the law such as civil aviation and telecommunications; this aspect also bears on issues
of "high politics," as through the fertile acts of improvisation that have transformed Chapters
VI and VII of the UN Charter to permit the contracting out of the use of force, diverse types
of multilateral sanctions, and peacekeeping/peace enforcement actions or determinations by