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The name given to a mission of permanent character sent to the headquarters of an international organization by a member state. The mission represents the state at the organization; maintains liaison between it and the sending state; negotiates with and within the organization; reports on its activities; protects the sending state\'s interests in relation to the organization; and ensures the participation of the sending state in its activities (ordinarily it is the mission\'s personnel who participate on behalf of their state in the meetings of the organization\'s organs and committees). The head of mission is called the state\'s permanent representative to the organization.
If an organization is of particular significance for a state, and its degree of activity justifies such action, the state is likely to accredit a permanent mission to it. Virtually all members of the United Nations, for example, maintain missions in New York, and the headship of such missions is one of the most important overseas appointments in their diplomatic services. However, there is no question of agrément being required from the organization or from the head of its secretariat for the head of such a mission. This is because the organization is quite unlike an individual state, being instead a collectivity of states; nor is the presentation of credentials by the head of mission to the head of the organization\'s secretariat attended by the formality which customarily and the pomp which occasionally marks the equivalent visit of an incoming head of mission to the receiving state\'s head of state. Furthermore, the credentials with which the head of a British permanent mission is furnished are not called letters of credence but a letter of introduction.
On the other hand, these procedural differences can once in a while eventuate in controversy over a head of mission\'s credentials. As these do not have to be cleared in advance, a civil conflict within a state can result in two claimants to a state\'s seat turning up at the organization, which then has to decide between them, or postpone the decision. Such matters are, of course, rarely subject to detached appraisal, but are determined by the political considerations involved and the relative number of votes that can be mustered by the backers of each claimant.
The members of a permanent mission (and also the officials of the organization to which they are accredited) are not hugely less in need of legal privileges and immunities than the members of a diplomatic mission accredited to a foreign state. In immediate terms, this is a matter for the host state (sense 2), which can be expected to attend to it by obtaining the necessary legislation. (If it did not wish to do so, it would hardly have agreed to play host to the organization, nor would the latter\'s members have settled on that location.) Generally, such privileges and immunities are not as extensive as those given to the members of embassies, but are reasonably liberal and sufficient for the missions’ needs.
The Vienna Convention on the Representation of States in their Relations with International Organizations of a Universal Character (1975) sets out one possible form of such privileges and immunities, but the Convention has not been widely accepted, let alone embodied by host states in their municipal law. The absence of reciprocity in this matter means that it is difficult to bring effective pressure on hosts to accept what others judge to be a desirable international standard.
Sometimes ‘permanent mission’ is used as a synonym for a diplomatic mission accredited to a foreign state, more especially a resident mission. |
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