ResourceBlog Article: Resource of the Week: International Not-for-Profit Law Center Online Library

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Wednesday, 16th May 2007

Resource of the Week: International Not-for-Profit Law Center Online Library

Resource of the Week: International Not-for-Profit Law Center Online Library
By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

The International Center for Not-For-Profit Law (ICNL) is an international not-for-profit organization that promotes an enabling legal environment for civil society, freedom of association, and public participation around the world.

That's a fairly broad mission statement. In actuality, ICNL does "not provide legal advice for forming a U.S. non-profit." Rather, it concentrates its efforts on "civil society issues" in "developing and transition countries." It has offices in Washington, D.C., Budapest, Bulgaria, Central Asia, Russia and Ukraine. The FAQ provides more detailed information about the organization.

We discovered an amazing gem here -- ICNL's Online Library, "a searchable directory of legal documents, court cases, reports, and other civil society resources from countries around the world. ICNL's Online Library currently contains 2338 resources from 144 countries in 37 languages." Access is quite straightforward -- dropdown menus allow you to browse by country and/or language, and a text box is available for a simple keyword search. Directly below the search form is a brief list to the most recently added documents, with links. To give you some idea of what this database contains, we spotted the following new items during our visit Wednesday morning:
+ Canada - Ministry of Government Services: Consultation Paper - Modernization of the Legal Framework Governing Ontario Not-for-Profit Corporations (English)
+ Afghanistan - Decision of the Cabinet of Ministers on Foreign Funding (English)
+ Saudi Arabia - Draft Regulations of Associations and Civil Organizations (Arabic)
+ Regional: World - Checklist for CSO (Civil Society Organizations) Laws (English)
+ Slovakia - Structural and Systemic Issues Surrounding the Establishment and Management of Endowments in the Czech and Slovak Republics (English)

Documents are in PDF format. Brief, free registration is required to access the full text.

The online library is part of ICNL's Knowledge Center. Here you can access the organization's International Journal of Not-for-Profit Law, a "quarterly journal of analysis on global civil society." The journal is distributed electronically; subscriptions are free. Many of the articles from the journal are available in the online library database.

What else is here?

ICNL produces a myriad of Tools and Publications focusing on a variety of issues affecting civil society, including taxation, guiding principles for not-for-profit laws, and tools for assessing civil society. ICNL’s publications also include informational materials on the legal and fiscal framework of NGOs, local language publications about laws affecting civil society, country and region-specific assessments of the legal framework for civil society, guidelines for laws affecting civil society, and key legal opinions.

Browsing the list, we saw such items as:
+ NGO Laws in Select Arab States (in English or Arabic)
+ Analysis of Tax Benefits for Charitable Donations by Individuals
+ Comparative Analysis of the Definition of NGOs and their Legal Treatment
+ A Handbook of NGO Governance
+ Charity Law and Regulation in the United Kingdom
+ Australian Country Report on Laws and Regulations Governing Non-profit Organizations
+ Philanthropy in Islam

Also included is a link to the comprehensive Bibliography on the Nonprofit Sector, Philanthropy, and Civil Society from the Association of American University Presses, compiled by Mark Sidel, Professor of Law and Faculty Scholar at the University of Iowa.

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