What ILOAT Keeps Telling International Organizations About Harassment (And Why Nobody Is Listening)

Here's a strange thing about international organizations: the body of law that governs how you investigate harassment is sitting in plain sight, and the people who need it most rarely read it.

ILOAT, the International Labour Organization Administrative Tribunal, is the ultimate appeal court for over 58,000 international civil servants across 62 international organizations. Its judgments are binding, public, and increasingly costly for organizations to overlook.

Over the past decade, the Tribunal has been building a body of jurisprudence that can seem difficult to decipher, especially if you don't have a legal background. Yet if you invest time and effort, this collection of decisions starts reading like a manual for how to run an internal justice system. The same themes appear, judgment after judgment. Organizations keep losing on the same points.

When it comes to harassment cases specifically, here are four of those themes, what the Tribunal has been saying, and what they should be changing inside your office.