Richard Brabin-Smith, a Visiting Fellow at ANU's Strategic and Defence Studies Centre, responds to Malcolm Cook's post on Zombie-like international institutions:
Here's a couple for your collection of defunct international organisations, though they were but minnows in the big ocean of international engagement: the Commonwealth Defence Science Organisation, and the Commonwealth Aeronautical Advisory Research Council (or words to that effect). 'Commonwealth' in this context meant the Commonwealth of Nations, not the Commonwealth of Australia.
As their names suggest, they had been designed, aeons ago, to facilitate cooperation in defence science and related matters between like-minded members of the Commonwealth. By the time I became the Chief Defence Scientist in 1993, membership had dwindled and they were struggling. At a time of tight budgets, it was an easy matter to decide to help close them down. They duly disappeared and Australia's membership thereby ended. Inter alia, I took the view that, if Australia were ever to want to build a defence science relationship with India, we would do so direct, and not mediated through some other body.