This chapter argues that the prevalent way for theorizing international organizations cannot properly account for the conceptual relationship between these institutions and states. At closer inspection, the popular treaty/contract versus subject/constitution frameworks for looking at international organizations address only the structural relationship between these institutions and their members. Nevertheless, one cannot simply assume that international organizations count as states for legal purposes just because they enjoy a legal personality that is distinct from their members, or because they share some relevant similarity with them. Equally important problems arise with analysing international organizations as merely another name for their member states acting together, and thus reducing the former to the latter. This view tends to disregard the fact that international organizations are often membered by entities that are neither states nor international organizations. Followed consistently, it also undermines the supposed distinct legal existence of these institutions.

The aim of this chapter is to gain a deeper understanding of the subject of rights, legal personality andrights of petition in international law in the run-up to the inclusion of rights of petition to the ECtHR in the ECHR. The analysis shows that there was a nascent debate on whether international organizations such as the United Nations (UN) could acquire legal personality and file complaints on behalf of victims of injury at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at the Hague but the extension of legal personality to corporations and the grant ofrights of petition to individual persons was not part of that debate. However,corporations had historically enjoyed legal personality in civil and common law systems. Thelegal persona was a mask or legal fiction to facilitate ownership and transfer of property by groups of individuals and corporations. The analysis suggests that the malleability of the fictitious ’legal persona’accommodated a multiplicity of political conceptions of the nature and aims of the corporation, facilitating the inclusion of legal persons as subjects of rights in A1P1.

Commencing with a brief introduction to the concept of legal personality in international law and the long-standing and remaining challenges associated with the recognition of corporations as subjects of international law, chapter two looks at SOEs through the lens of the concept of legal personality in international law and argues that SOEs are a sui generis type of 'participant' in international law. The following distinguishing characteristics make SOEs a sui generis participant in international law: their belonging to the public domain, their role and rationale for existence and the creation of separate regulatory regimes to address some of the challenges associated with State corporate ownership at domestic, regional and international level. By delving deeper into the close connection between the State and its SOEs, the chapter argues that from the perspective of the SOE, the widely accepted responsibility to respect human rights is elevated to the level of a duty in the case of SOEs. Overall, the chapter demonstrated the increased heterogeneity and complexity of the notion of participation on the international plane.