The current openGlobalRights debate on internationalizing human rights NGOs misses a crucial point: “international” NGOs are also the sum of a group of individual organizations established under distinct national laws, more or less connected to one another through trademark agreements.
Within this transnational NGO coalition, the right to speak on the group’s behalf is unevenly distributed; some units and individuals can, while others cannot. This inequality suggests that we must pay attention to the diversity behind the singular organizational entity, which is in fact an international NGO network, all the members of which use the same name and operating rules.
Who, for example, is allowed to speak on behalf of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch (HRW)? Can all national branches (or committees, in HRW) speak out equally? Regulating the right to represent the NGO is also a trademark and licensing issue in which the different national units struggle to define and dominate organizational identity.
