On 8 July 2016, the UN General Assembly (UN GA) adopted by consensus
an Agreement Concerning the Relationship between the UN and the
International Organization for Migration (IOM) (the 2016 Agreement).
IOM renamed itself ‘UN Migration’ on the grounds that the Agreement
had transitioned it into ‘UN-related’ status, through which it became
‘part of the UN family’. Yet the phrase ‘UN-related’ is neither mentioned
in the agreement nor an expression of legal art. Such an interpretation
fails to reflect the pre-existing legal relationship between the two organizations
which was set out in a similar agreement concluded twenty years
earlier. This chapter finds that in legal terms, the differences between the
1996 and 2016 UN-IOM Agreements are modest. That finding is important
because the later Agreement has been used to justify a significant shift in IOM identity.