A aplicação de direitos humanos por tribunais administrativos de organizações internacionais: prática de vinculação normativa em relações de trabalho?

Abstract

Since the creation of the League of Nations Administrative Tribunal in the 1920s, international organizations have progressively created their own internal tribunals or recognized the jurisdiction of the ILO and UN courts to settle disputes with their employees. In addition to the constitutive treaty and the organization's rules and practice, these bodies recurrently apply general principles of law in their judgments, including human rights principles. This practice has already been explored by some authors such as Gerard Ullrich and C. F. Amerasinghe, but little has been said about the relationship between this jurisprudence and more general practice and doctrine on the human rights obligations of international organizations. In this context, this work analyses the extent to which the jurisprudence of the UN Disputes and Appeals Tribunals and the ILO Administrative Tribunal on the application of human rights standards reaffirms or contradicts doctrinal theories and practice regarding the binding of IOs to such standards. The present research was based on jurisprudential search by keywords in the databases available on the official websites of the selected tribunals. From the ILO Administrative Tribunal, 161 cases were analysed under the keywords "human rights" and/or "fundamental right", without time limitation, and another 315 cases under the keyword "principle" from 2018 to 2024. From the UN Dispute and Appeals Tribunals, 82 cases were examined under the filter of "agreements, conventions, treaties (etc.)" and 37 additional cases with mention of "human rights" and/or "fundamental right", with no time limit. A further 69 cases mentioning "principle" were also examined since 2018, in both UN internal courts. Of these cases, those relevant to the topic studied were first selected and then those considered representative of the positions of the elected tribunals in relation to the application of human rights. The conclusion reached is that the jurisprudence of these courts reaffirms the theory that international organizations are bound by human rights standards through general international law, however, it expands the scope of obligations of this nature recognized by IOs at the international level.