considering their special vulnerability and the importance of education for their empowerment.<sup>93</sup> Evidently, the state’s duty to provide access to education to indigenous children cannot be discharged effectively if the state is expected to take a hands-off approach in the affairs on indigenous people. Thus, it may be reasonably argued that it is in the best interest of indigenous children for the state to ‘interfere’ in the affairs of indigenous peoples in order to establish measures to enhance their access to quality education. That certain indigenous communities may explicitly reject the state’s formal educational curriculum and content, its pedagogical modes of delivery, and its insistence upon classes being conducted in a national language (but thereby compromising the integrity of their native tongue<sup>94</sup> ) creates legitimate claims that are directly in tension with countervailing rights and responsibilities. It is inherently unclear which of these should prevail.

# **4. When and how does international law inform decisions about whether multilateral development agencies should or should not engage with sovereign national states?**

In multilateral decision-making systems, states and non-state actors operate on consent. States express their consent to be bound by an international law, agreement or other condition through their plenipotentiaries who are vested with full powers.<sup>95</sup> Until a state has expressed such consent, it cannot be bound by the treaty in question. Even more, a state may decide to withdraw their consent at any time and unilaterally renounce their membership or withdraw from a treaty signaling their extensive autonomy. This consent-based decision-making system is predicated on the principle of sovereign equality which underpins inter-state relations and requires states to exercise restraint when dealing with other countries to avoid undermining their sovereignty. This further dictates the principle of noninterference or non-intervention, a corollary of the principle of sovereign equality. Both principles, rooted in customary international law, prohibit states from intervening in the internal and external affairs of other states.

The applicability of these principles to non-state actors has been challenged – it has been argued that both the sovereignty principle and the non-intervention principle apply exclusively to states and that non-state actors such as multinational organizations need not uphold them.<sup>96</sup> This view does not accurately reflect the applicability of international law to international organizations. There is conceptually no justification under international law to exempt international organizations from the application of international law. “An organization formed by states will be bound by the obligations

> 93 Article 17 of the UNDRIP; Article 32 of the CRC

> 94 It is empirically well-documented that students learn best in their native language, but in a country such as Papua New Guinea, where over 800 known languages are spoken in a national population of just 12 million people, it is essentially impossible for the state to provide optimal learning environments for _all_ its citizens. Indeed, the state’s pragmatic insistence on having formal education conducted in one or two national languages – not only in PNG but anywhere – is regarded by many observers as a key driver of large-scale language loss (and outright extinction) around the contemporary world (see the discussion in Wade Davis, _The Wayfinders._ House of Anansi Press, 2009).

> 95 See the essays addressing these (and many other) issues as they pertain to development in <mark>Siobhan McInerneyLankford and Robert McCorquodale, eds. (2023)</mark> _<mark>The Roles of International Law in Development</mark>_ <mark>(Oxford University Press).</mark>

> 96 Marko Milanovic (2023), ‘Revisiting Coercion as an Element of Prohibited Intervention in International Law.’ _American Journal of International Law_ , 117(4), 601–650. doi:10.1017/ajil.2023.40 citing <mark>Government of the Netherlands, Appendix: International Law in Cyberspace (July 2019),</mark> at <u><mark>https://www.government.nl/documents/parliamentarydocuments/2019/09/26/letter-to-the-parliament-on-the-international-legal-order-in-cyberspace (official English</mark></u> <mark>translation)</mark>

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