The Internal Justice of the United Nations: A Critical History 1945–2015. By Abdelaziz Megzari

Abdelaziz Megzari, with more than 35 years of experience as a UN official, has made a useful contribution in preserving an institutional record of the highly-politicised debates leading up to the development of the UN’s internal justice system. As the author notes in the Preface itself, on 1 July 2009, after a lengthy reform process, the UN completely abandoned its much-maligned system of internal justice, which had been in place since its creation, for a modernised internal justice machinery. A specialised book such as this one would have been of much greater significance had it been published during the reform process. Nevertheless, this book offers a useful record of the institutional history of the UN’s internal justice system, providing some fascinating insights into the political climate of the Cold War era and its impact on the UN’s internal law vis-à-vis its personnel affairs.