The latest issue of the Journal of International Wildlife Law & Policy (Vol. 19, no. 1, 2016) is out. Contents include:
Each term in the title of this essay seems simple, yet provides much food for analytical thought. The essay thus explores: what is “conflict,” and whether there is a “time” when it is not present; who is a “child”; whether and to what extent children enjoy “rights”; and, finally, how local, national, and international regimes go about “securing” those rights. The essay – based on a talk given at the 2015 International Law Weekend in New York – concludes with a glance at a new potential avenue for child security: the Sustainable Development Goals which the U.N. General Assembly adopted that same year.
International courts and tribunals play an increasingly fundamental role in the maintenance of peace and stability, economic development, and the protection of human dignity. Indeed, the cases they hear and resolve originate and touch upon such diverse spheres as boundary disputes, the use of force, the regulation of trade and investment, and violations of human rights. With increased visibility and relevance, however, also comes increased scrutiny. Issues of scrutiny have included and highlighted concerns related to the procedures to remove judges and arbitrators, as a fundamental principle of due process.
Indeed, robust and effective challenges procedures of judges and arbitrators are fundamental control mechanisms, and are of vital importance to guarantee the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals. Yet, challenges of judges and arbitrators in international courts and tribunals remain an understudied subject.
This article seeks to correct this unbalance by making three novel contributions. First, it compares for the first time challenges procedures across a variety of international courts and tribunals, including both permanent and ad hoc institutions. Second, it provides unique data on challenges, purposefully collected for this article, and analyses their outcome in details. Third, it suggests the use of two specific challenges procedures, namely for decisions on challenges to be taken by an external or semi-external institution, and the adoption of a common standard of review based on a reasonable third-party observer.
Post-Konflikt-Staaten stellen nicht nur eine potentielle Bedrohung für deren Bevölkerung dar, sondern können auch den internationalen Frieden gefährden. Die Responsibility to Rebuild fordert als Teilbereich der Responsibility to Protect von der internationalen Gemeinschaft Unterstützung beim Wiederaufbau von Post-Konflikt-Staaten ein, um zukünftige Menschenrechtsverletzungen zu vermeiden. Simon Hümmrich-Welt zeigt, inwieweit eine solche Wiederaufbauverantwortung bereits Teil des geltenden Völkerrechtes ist.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 20, no. 3, 2016) is out. Contents include:
The report, which summarizes the PCA’s major activities over the course of the previous year and provides an overview of its case docket, is targeted at Member States as well as the wider international arbitration community. Over the course of the past year, the Permanent Court of Arbitration administered 138 cases, 42 of which were initiated that year. The PCA also received 42 requests relating to its appointing authority services. With its accession to the 1907 Hague Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes on 22 March 2015, the Republic of Georgia became the 117th Member State of the PCA.
The latest issue of the Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht (Vol. 75, no. 2, 2016) is out. Contents include:
The latest issue of the American Journal of International Law (Vol. 109, no. 4, October 2015) is out. Contents include:
Whether China ultimately wants to continue to be a party to UNCLOS should be the result of a legal and political cost-benefit analysis. The Convention itself opens the way for China to leave the Convention and it would have good reasons to do so if its territorial sovereignty was undermined by a decision of an arbitral tribunal established under the Convention.
Call for Papers – The 2016 AHRI Human Rights Research Conference
The Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) calls for the submission of proposals for papers to be presented at the general AHRI Human Rights Research Conference to be held at the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) in Utrecht, the Netherlands, on 2-3 September 2016:
50 Years of the Two UN Human Rights Covenants:
Legacies and Prospects2016 will mark a half century since the adoption of the two foundational human rights treaties, the ICCPR and ICESCR. The 50th anniversary of the two Covenants is the starting point for the general and broader 2016 AHRI Human Rights Research Conference.
The division between two categories of human rights made in 1966 still leaves its mark on the ways in which human rights are institutionalised and implemented both nationally and internationally today. Many attempts have been made to restore and maintain the indivisibility of all human rights, as has been shown by later, more specialised and regional treaties and practices. In today’s complex arena of international and regional human rights institutions, victims of violations have used civil-political rights institutions to pursue ESC-rights claims and the other way around. In parallel, the increase in human rights instruments since 1966 has rightly been accompanied by a call to shift the emphasis from norms to implementation. Thus, it is highly topical to study and discuss how the two types of rights have become increasingly intertwined since their separation in the Covenants and how many actors have pushed for their integral realisation. In addressing these issues, it is also relevant to complement legal scholarship with insights from the many other disciplines that have focused on human rights in the past decades.
The coming of age of the two key UN human rights Covenants also brings the question of their continued viability to the fore. Are the Covenants still equipped, both normatively and in their enforcement mechanisms, to address the human rights challenges of both today and tomorrow? The belief in progress of the 1960s with promises of permanent economic growth has faded. This sheds a new light on normative starting points such as the progressive realisation of rights. The economic crisis, austerity measures and the rise of powerful new economic players beyond the state force us to rethink the meaning and effects of human rights.
The scope of human rights protection has been broadened enormously over the last half century, covering an increasing number of rights and specific groups. However, the protection against the actions and inaction of groups beyond the state, ranging from armed groups to civil society organisations, has not kept pace. New protection mechanisms may be required to meet these challenges and existing players, such as the European Union or specific human rights courts or committees, may need to reconsider their working methods. The self-evidence of the state as the core player in the international order has also been challenged in other respects, e.g. by the trans-border effects of migration, conflict, and environmental change.
All of these developments require us not just to look back but also to look into the future. For the human rights research community, this not only entails tackling new themes and issues, but also reconceptualising existing norms and concepts and increasingly exploring collaboration across disciplines.
As the largest inter-disciplinary and general research conference on human rights, the 2016 AHRI Conference welcomes both individual papers and panels exploring any of the above mentioned themes. The 50th anniversary of the two Covenants is the leading theme, but proposals do not need to be limited to that, as the AHRI research conference aims to be a general platform for discussing new human rights research. Preference will be given to strong proposals falling within one of the following six tracks, under which several panels will be organised:
• 1. Indivisibility and Interactions of Norms and RegimesThis track invites submissions which look into the interactions between different sets of rights and between different human rights protection regimes. How do the two sets of rights represented by the two UN Covenants, civil-political and socio-economic, interact? How do regional regimes affect global human rights institutions and vice versa? And how does crossfertilization across regions and between states in the area of human rights work in practice?
• 2. Citizenship, Migrants and Refugees
This track juxtaposes the insiders and outsiders of human rights protection as one of the fiercest battlegrounds. How do differences in treatment between citizens and refugees and migrants play out in practice? Which normative underpinnings frame these policies and to what extent can they be challenged? Do we need to re-define the concepts of citizenship and refugees and rethink rights related to freedom of movement and territoriality? Are existing treaties up for revision or are entirely new frameworks necessary?
• 3. Non-state Actors and Human Rights
This track welcomes contributions related to influential actors and institutions beyond the state. Whereas the two UN Covenants focused traditionally on the role of the state, one may question whether they are still useful tools to address the human rights behaviour, both positive and negative, of non state actors such as armed groups, businesses and civil society organisations.
• 4. The European Union and Human Rights
This track, organized in cooperation with the EU FRAME Project, explores how the European Union, both as a global player and in its internal policies geared towards its Member States, respects and protects human rights. To what extent does coherence exist between these internal and external policies? How does the EU deal with the two sets of rights represented by the UN Covenants?
• 5. The Global Economy and Human Rights
This track welcomes submissions related to the effects of global inequality, of the economic crisis and austerity measures, and the role of international financial and economic institutions and their impact on human rights protection. Does the idea of progressive realization of rights, as reflected in ICESCR, still make sense? And do we need to imbue our research with new concepts and methodologies to deal with the linkages between the economy and human rights protection?
• 6. New Avenues in Human Rights Research
This track invites exploration into new themes and methodologies of human rights research. Which issues reflect new human rights challenges for the present and what are the future prospects of current human rights norms, as e.g. laid down in the two Covenants? Do we need to re-think existing human rights historiographies? Multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary papers are particularly welcome.
Practical Information
The 2016 AHRI conference is hosted by the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights (SIM) of Utrecht University, and will take place on 2-3 September 2016. The conference coincides with SIM’s 35th anniversary, which will be celebrated in the evening of 1 September. The conference is open to both AHRI and non-AHRI members and aims to bring together both junior and senior academics to present innovative human rights research in the law, the humanities, the social sciences and other disciplines.
Travel and accommodation costs are expected to be covered by the participants themselves. Individual bursaries may be available for particular panels upon request. A registration fee of 70 EUR will cover amenities and lunches during both days of the conference.
Submission of Abstracts and Panel Proposals
Interested participants should submit by email one unified document including: 1) title of paper, 2) a clear indication of the track to which the paper belongs, 3) an abstract of no more than 500 words, 4) author name, affiliation and short biographical details, 5) contact details. Papers can be presented on any topic related to human rights and should be unpublished. Interdisciplinary projects and jointly authored papers are welcomed (with the proviso that only one person will be allowed to present).
Proposals for entire panels are equally welcome, indicating the title, abstract and author of each paper. Note: a panel consists of 3 speakers and 1 proposed discussant may be indicated. Alternatively, panels of four speakers (without a discussant, so as to allow sufficient time for discussion) might be considered. To ensure diversity in all respects, panels which are a mix of male-female and consist of researchers from different research institutions will be given precedence.
Researchers at all career stages, from PhD students to full professors, are invited to submit.
Deadline for submission
The deadline for submission of abstracts and panel proposals is 25 March 2016. Submissions should be sent to AHRI@uu.nl.
All abstracts will be reviewed by the AHRI Programme Committee and selections announced by early May 2016. Formal registration for the conference will be possible from mid-May onwards. For practical questions about the conference and for questions related to the submission of papers and the overall conference programme, please contact us at AHRI@uu.nl. For questions relating to AHRI, including admission of new member institutions, please contact Eva Maria Lassen, eva@humanrights.dk.
The AHRI Conference Programme Committee
Antoine Buyse (SIM Utrecht, Conference Chair), Thomas Gammeltoft-Hansen (AHRI Executive Chairman), Katharine Fortin, Jan Wouters, Katarzyna Sękowska-Kozłowska, Elena Katselli , Sejal Parmar and Karen Busby
The Association of Human Rights Institutes (AHRI) is comprised of over fifty leading academic institutes with a mandate to advance research, education, and discussion in the field of human rights.
This article categorizes three approaches to theorizing transnational legal ordering that respectively address private legal ordering, reconfigure the concept of law, and provide a framework for the study of the interaction of norm-making and practice at the transnational, national, and local levels. The first approach develops theory based on the nature of the actors (private actors) and the form of legal ordering (private legal ordering), examining lawmaking, adjudication, and enforcement though non-state institutions. The second approach is conceptual and critical, developing transnational legal theory to critique and reformulate the concept of law to include non-state processes. The third approach provides a framework for orienting socio-legal study of the transnational processes through which legal norms are constructed, flow, and settle across national borders. The processes can be top-down, bottom-up, horizontal, and transversal, involving interaction among different public and private organizations and networks at different levels of social organization, from the transnational to the local, potentially giving rise to distinct transnational legal orders.
Recently, Western democracies have turned to building border walls as a strategy of immigration control. This paper makes two claims. First, human rights courts and quasi-judicial bodies are deeply implicated in this move. Drawing on an analysis of case law, I show that they have worked out a system in which walls have become a predictable strategic solution for states that seek to retain control over immigration. Second, the way human rights enforcement bodies have treated border walls has made them legally permitted and even encouraged their construction. Immigration walls raise a jurisdictional challenge. Human rights law and the national law of many democratic states guarantee individuals that have established territorial presence access to basic human rights. A porous border is thus required by the very concept of universal human rights. In one view, because a wall is concrete in a way that the jurisdictional border is not, erecting a wall closes the porous border and is thus a matter of human rights. In another view, the construction of a wall is an administrative technique for controlling immigration and is, from a human rights perspective, a non-event. Neither view, however, can be wholly supported. The first is politically unsustainable, while the second is morally indefensible. Human rights enforcement bodies avoid taking a stand by regulating the physical structure of the wall. The result is the redrawing of borders that is politically unstable and is normatively unjustifiable.
The latest issue of the World Trade Review (Vol. 15, no. 2, April 2016) is out. Contents include:
This chapter for the book “Landmark Cases in Public International Law” discusses two famous U.S. Supreme Court decisions — The Charming Betsy (1804) and The Paquete Habana (1900). Although written nearly one hundred years apart, each decision appears to stand for similar propositions — that international law has an important place in the law of the United States, but that U.S. domestic law should prevail in the event of conflict. What often goes unnoticed is that the Supreme Court decided these cases against the backdrop of very different understandings about international law and its relationship to U.S. domestic law.
In addition to discussing the background and significance of each case, this chapter describes three shifts in U.S. thinking about customary international law during the nineteenth century. First, the theoretical foundations of customary international law shifted away from natural law towards positivism. Second, the consent requirement for making customary international law shifted from the individual consent of each state to the consent of states generally. And third, the U.S. understanding of the relationship between international law and domestic law shifted away from monism towards dualism — away from an understanding that international law was part of U.S. law unless displaced, towards an understanding that international law was not part of U.S. law unless adopted. The Charming Betsy and The Paquete Habana are landmark cases not because they changed the course of international law in the United States but because they reveal changes in the landscape.
Modern corporations are key participants in the new globalized economy. As such, they have been accorded tremendous latitude and granted extensive rights. However, accompanying obligations have not been similarly forthcoming. Chief among them is the obligation not to commit atrocities or human rights abuses in the pursuit of profit. Multinational corporations are increasingly complicit in genocides that occur in the developing world. While they benefit enormously from the crime, they are immune from prosecution at the international level. Prosecuting Corporations for Genocide proposes new legal pathways to ensure such companies are held criminally liable for their conduct by creating a framework for international criminal jurisdiction. If a state or a person commits genocide, they are punished, and international law demands such. Nevertheless, corporate actors have successfully avoided this through an array of legal arguments which Professor Kelly challenges. He demonstrates how international criminal jurisdiction should be extended over corporations for complicity in genocide and makes the case that it should be done promptly.
This book examines the contemporary production of economic value in today’s financial economies. Much of the regulatory response to the global financial crisis has been based on the assumption that curbing the speculative ‘excesses’ of the financial sphere is a necessary and sufficient condition for restoring a healthy economic system, endowed with real values, as distinct from those produced by financial markets. How, though, can the ‘intrinsic’ value of goods and services produced in the sphere of the so-called real economy be disentangled from the ‘artificial’ value engineered within the financial sphere?
Examining current projects of international legal regulation, this book questions the regulation of the financial sphere insofar as its excesses are juxtaposed to some notion of economic normality. Given the problem of neatly distinguishing these domains – and so, more generally, between economy and society, and production and social reproduction – it considers the limits of our current conceptualization of value production and measurement, with specific reference to arrangements in the areas of finance, trade and labour. Drawing on a range of innovative work in the social sciences, and attentive to the spatial and temporal connections that make the global economy, as well as the racial, gender and class articulations of the social reproductive field within it, it further asks: what alternative arrangements might be able to affect, and indeed alter, the value-making processes that underlie our current international regulatory framework?
Jean Monnet Doctoral Workshop:
Interactions Between European Union and International LawThe workshop is organized by City University London and the Jean Monnet Chair in EU Law (held by Professor Panos Koutrakos). It follows the successful organisation of the 1st Jean Monnet Doctoral Workshop by the University of Geneva in September 2015.
Aims
The aims of the workshop are threefold:
- to enable excellent junior researchers to present their work in an informal setting and benefit from the comments made by fellow researchers and established EU law scholars;
- to facilitate the development of the papers presented at the workshop into online publications;
- to establish an informal community of doctoral researchers in the area of EU law in general and EU external relations law in particular.
Topic
This call is for papers examining Interactions between EU and International Law. The theme is to be approached broadly. Papers may cover, for example, any of the following: substantive interactions (focusing on a specific policy or development or issue); judicial interactions (for instance, between the CJEU and international courts); the approach of CJEU and national courts on the interpretation and application of international law in the EU legal order; constitutional interactions (for instance, by focusing on broader questions about how the EU interacts with the rest of the world).
The workshop is open to all types of legal scholarship: doctrinal, theoretical, contextual and interdisciplinary approaches are all welcome - the only criterion is the quality of the proposal.
Process
This call is for proposals by junior researchers working on their PhD (or having just finished their PhD). Once the selection of papers to be presented to at the workshop is made, each paper will be allocated to a senior academic who is an expert in the field. S/he will comment on the paper at the workshop and, then, on a final draft with a view to assessing its suitability for being published online as part of the Jean Monnet Working Papers.
The City Law School will pay for travel and accommodation for one evening.
How to apply
Please send a proposal of no more than 600 words and a copy of your CV by filling in this form: https://forms.city.ac.uk/forms/51032.
The deadline for applications is 25 March 2016.
Only PhD researchers (or researchers who have just finished their PhD) are eligible.
For any queries, please contact Mr Peter Aggar (Peter.Aggar.1@city.ac.uk).
CALL FOR PAPERS:
INTERACTION BETWEEN HUMAN RIGHTS:
50 YEARS OF THE COVENANTSINTRAlaw (International and Transnational Tendencies in Law) is organising an academic workshop on 29–30 September 2016 on the theme of Interaction between human rights: 50 years of the Covenants.
The colloquium will bring together scholars working on the interaction within the human rights regime on the international, regional and domestic planes. What is of interest is the way that the two covenants have influenced each other in their legal development; and, significantly, the way that different human rights systems have influenced each other in the definition and implementation of these rights.
Particular attention will be given to the activities of the Human Rights Committee and the Committee on Economic Social and Cultural Rights, and their role in interpreting and driving implementation of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR).
Guest speakers
Guest speakers include Prof. Sir Nigel Rodley, Prof. Xavier Groussot, Mr. Morten Kjærum, Dr. Jonas Christoffersen, Prof. Sarah Cleveland, Prof. Mikael Rask Madsen, Prof. Geir Ulfstein, Prof. Kjetil Mujezinović Larsen and Prof. Gregor Noll.
Abstract themes
INTRAlaw is accepting abstracts exploring one of the following themes:
- Interaction between UN treaty bodies and regional and domestic human rights systems
- Interaction between and within regional human rights systems (e.g. ECtHR/CJEU)
- Indivisibility and interrelatedness of rights, in particular within and between the Covenants
- The impact and influence of the ICCPR and ICESCR within thematic areas, especially refugee protection, business and human rights, armed conflict and counter-terrorism
- Interaction between the Covenants and specialised human rights treaties
- The role of the UN Human Rights Council in fostering compliance with the ICCPR and ICESCR
- Implementation and enforcement of the ICCPR and ICESCR at the domestic and regional levels
- Applicability of the Covenants to non-state actors (businesses, armed groups, international organisations)
Formalities
- Abstracts should be no longer than 300 words, including title of the presentation, author’s name, affiliations and email address. PhD candidates and other early career researchers are particularly encouraged to apply.
- Abstracts must be sent to nita@law.au.dk and fbilling@law.au.dk, no later than 15 April 2016.
- The authors of the selected abstracts will be required to submit a paper of max. 8000 words, footnotes included, by 15 September 2016.
- It is intended that the results of the Colloquium will be published in an edited volume or a special journal issue.
A limited number of funding grants to cover travel and accommodation expenses may be available in special circumstances.
Organising committee
Fenella Billing, Nikolas Feith Tan, Louise Halleskov Storgaard, Lauren Neumann, Vito Todeschini, Tara Van Ho, Jens Vedsted-Hansen.
About INTRAlaw
INTRAlaw is a research centre established within the Department of Law at Aarhus University in Denmark. INTRAlaw research takes as its point of departure the fact that sovereign states are no longer solely in charge of defining, implementing and enforcing legal norms. To an increasing extent, legal norms are created as a result of activities in international and supranational organisations, transnational corporations and through collaborations between public-law and private-law agencies on a national, regional and international level.
The latest issue of the Journal of International Arbitration (Vol. 33, no. 1, 2016) is out. Contents include:
The purpose of this paper is to provide a succinct overview of Asian and Pacific international organizations through the lens of institutional law. The paper demonstrates that the number of Asian and Pacific IOs is increasing with more in existence than is often presumed. There are many more Asian and Pacific IOs at present than the well-known few such as ASEAN, the Economic Cooperation Organization, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the recently created Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. As far as their institutional law is concerned, Asian and Pacific IOs are not fundamentally different from other IOs: there is unity within diversity. Even though there are significant differences between the 58 IOs covered – as far as membership, institutional structure, powers, etc. are concerned – in many respects they are similar, not only to each other but also to IOs outside the region. Almost all of them are created by treaty, almost all of them have only states as members, almost all of them are international legal persons (whether or not this is explicitly stated in the constitution), most of them have the privileges and immunities that are usually given to IOs, including the immunity from jurisdiction, and most secretariats are independent. Perhaps the only significant difference between Asian and Pacific IOs and other IOs is that there are no Asian and Pacific IOs that have judicial organs, and hardly any have parliamentary organs or frameworks for cooperation amongst members of parliaments of the member states of these organizations.
Within the framework of the CUS Doctoral Programme
Law, Ideas and Politics of Europe
the Chair of Public International and European Law and the European Law Institute at the University of Fribourg (Prof. Samantha BESSON),
the Chair of European History of the University at Fribourg
(Prof. Gilbert CASASUS),
the World Trade Institute of the University at Bern
(Prof. Thomas COTTIER & Prof. Michael HAHN) and
the Chair of Political Philosophy of the University at Bern,
(Prof. Markus STEPANIANS)
organize a
Doctoral Colloquium on
Responsibility in International and European Law, Philosophy and History
at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) – 11-12th November, 2016
Responsibility is not only an inescapable concept in law, philosophy and history, but one that is still fraught with important conceptual and normative difficulties. Herbert Hart’s famous passage is often quoted as evidence of the polysemic nature of responsibility in law, but also by extension in philosophy and history:
“As captain of the ship, X was responsible for the safety of his passengers and crew. But on his last voyage he got drunk every night and was responsible for the loss of the ship with all aboard. It was rumoured that he was insane, but the doctors considered that he was responsible for his actions. Throughout the voyage, he behaved quite irresponsibly, and various incidents in his career showed that he was not a responsible person. He always maintained that the exceptional winter storms were responsible for the loss of the ship, but in the legal proceedings brought against him he was found criminally responsible for his negligent conduct, and in separate civil proceedings he was held legally responsible for the loss of life and property. He is still alive and he is morally responsible for the deaths of many women and children.” (Punishment and Responsibility, Clarendon Press: Oxford 1968, 211).
Responsibility is actually a concept whose transferability from one of these three disciplines or practices to the other has generated a lot of controversy. It suffices to mention the role of history in ascertaining attribution or causality in international law cases, and especially recent decisions by the European Court of Human Rights such as Janowiec and Others v. Russia or Perinçek v. Switzerland. All this explains why responsibility constitutes a promising topic for the annual Doctoral Colloquium of our joint CUS Doctoral Programme.
The proposed colloquium will bring together 10 doctoral students and 5 senior speakers from all three disciplines working on issues of responsibility and interested in discussing them further. We hope thereby to gain in clarity on the concept itself, but also to identify a new field of interdisciplinary cooperation among international and European lawyers, philosophers and historians working on international and European issues. Papers by selected doctoral students will be written in advance, circulated and discussed (after only a very short presentation) first by a senior commentator and then generally. The language will be English.
Here are some of the questions we plan to discuss:
- What is the relationship between moral and legal responsibility?
- Can there be law without responsibility? What are the exact ties between responsibility and legality?
- How should we understand responsibility: as liability? As answerability or accountability?
- How is the “responsibility to protect” related to other forms of responsibility in international law?
- What are the ties between legal subjecthood or personality and responsibility?
- Should responsibility only be individual? Or should it also be collective? What should be the relations between the two?
- What kind of groups may be held responsible? Do they need to take a political form? And that of a “state” only?
- Is it just to hold states, and hence their individual constituency, collectively responsible? Should we not rather focus on individual responsibility instead?
- How about international organizations? Is it more just to hold their constituent states (and individual constituency, eventually) responsible than the organization itself?
- Is there a connection between responsibility and democracy or self-determination? What is it exactly?
- Who can and should hold another person/group/state/international organization responsible? Any other subject? What relationship should there be between the two?
- What does the distinction between civil, criminal and public liability at law capture about kinds of moral responsibility?
- How about the distinction between contractual and non-contractual liability?
- What are the grounds of moral responsibility? Which are the ones mostly used in international law? Why?
- Can responsibility be intergenerational? How does it relate to historical responsibility?
- Should we use history to establish causality, assess the duration of a violation or attribute conduct in international responsibility law? In general, what should be the role of history in international responsibility law?
- How about the reverse? How should the law be factored into the history of responsibility?
- What is historical about “historical injustice”?
- Can there be responsibility without a primary obligation?
- Is responsibility necessarily triggered by a wrongful act?
- What are the obligations or “responsibilities” that derive from responsibility?
- What are the best ways to secure reparations?
- Why are historical clarification and truth at the centre of many international law mechanisms of responsibility? Should it be so?
- Should the denial a historical truth constitute an abuse of rights and hence a limitation on state responsibility for the violation of freedom of speech?
- Is “bad history” in a judgment “bad law”? What are the standards for “good history” in a legal context?
We are inviting interested doctoral students to apply with a proposal. Proposals may, without being necessarily limited to them, address any of the questions in the list or combinations thereof. We strongly encourage interdisciplinary proposals that try to explore links between any aspect of responsibility in law, philosophy and/or history. This year, we have invited the following senior speakers to contribute and to comment on one of the doctoral students’ papers: Prof. Pierre d’Argent, Université catholique de Louvain ; Prof. Antony Duff, University of Sterling; Prof. Lukas Meyer, Universität Graz; Prof. Davide Rodogno, Institut des hautes études internationales et du développement (Genève) and Prof. Sevane Garibian, Université de Genève.
Interested doctoral students may submit the following documents by email and by 15th March, 2016 to the Programme’s Coordinator, Mr Alexandre Biedermann (alexandre.biedermann@unifr.ch):
- abstract (max 5’000 characters)
- short CV
- name of thesis supervisor and institution
The candidates will be informed about their acceptance by 5th April, 2016. The selected candidates are asked to submit their papers (max. 8’000 words including footnotes) no later than 1st October, 2016. Selected papers are expected to be published as part of an edited volume on the subject in 2017.
Important dates
Application 15th March, 2016
Acceptance 5th April, 2016
Papers 1st October, 2016
Colloquium 11-12 November, 2016Funding: Accommodation will be provided to doctoral students from the University of Bern. Due to budgetary constraints, we regret that we are unable to provide travel, accommodation or other financial assistance to doctoral students from other institutions (except free meals and coffee breaks at the conference, of course).
In this study, Heike Niebergall-Lackner discusses the classical military offence of desertion from the standpoint of international law. Taking account of the three factual situations that might arise following a desertion in international armed conflicts - capture by the home country, capture or crossing over to the enemy party, and seeking refuge in a country not involved in the conflict – the examination offers a comprehensive overview of the treatment and the protection afforded to deserters under international human rights law, international humanitarian law and refugee law. The examination is conducted against the background of the duties of soldiers under modern international law and shows that, depending on the legality of the conflict, desertion might represent the legitimate decision of the individual to act in accordance with these duties.
The reputation and achievement of the ASEAN Community hinges on compliance. This seminal book discusses whether ASEAN's faith in dispute settlement and monitoring mechanisms as a means to better compliance is justified and delves into the extent to which they can facilitate ASEAN Community building. It provides the first comprehensive and systematic analysis of ASEAN's compliance with its instruments, and enables readers to see ASEAN as an organisation increasingly based on law and institutions. Readers will also learn how ASEAN balances a thin line between law and institutions on the one hand and diplomacy and realism on the other. Scholars of adjudicatory mechanisms will find this book a fascinating addition to the literature available, and it will serve as a 'go-to' reference for ASEAN state agencies. The book will also interest academics and practitioners working on comparative and cross-disciplinary studies of dispute settlement, monitoring mechanisms, compliance, and international and regional organisations.
Are international fisheries heading away from open access to a global commons towards a regime of property rights? The distributional implications of denying access to newcomers and re-entrants that used the resource in the past are fraught. Should the winners in this process compensate the losers and, if so, how? Regional Fisheries Management Organisations, in whose gift participatory rights increasingly lie, are perceptibly shifting their attention to this approach, which has hitherto been little analysed; this book provides a review of the practice of these bodies and the States that are their members. The recently favoured response of governments, combating 'IUU' - illegal, unregulated and unreported - fishing, is shown to rest on a flawed concept, and the solution might lie less in law than in legal policy: compulsory dispute settlement to moderate their claims and an expansion of the possibilities of trading of quotas to make solving the global overcapacity issue easier.
Every year, states negotiate, conclude, sign, and give effect to hundreds of new international agreements. Koremenos argues that the detailed design provisions of such agreements matter for phenomena that scholars, policymakers, and the public care about: when and how international cooperation occurs and is maintained. Theoretically, Koremenos develops hypotheses regarding how cooperation problems like incentives to cheat can be confronted and moderated through law's detailed design provisions. Empirically, she exploits her data set composed of a random sample of international agreements in economics, the environment, human rights and security. Her theory and testing leads to a consequential discovery: considering the vagaries of international politics, international cooperation looks more law-like than anarchical, with the detailed provisions of international law chosen in ways that increase the prospects and robustness of cooperation. This nuanced and sophisticated 'continent of international law' can speak to scholars in any discipline where institutions, and thus institutional design, matter.
This paper examines the renaissance of the city as a global actor within the context of ‘the relationship between international law, international actorhood, and the political practice of foreign policy’. First, it discusses briefly the city as a global actor from a historical sociological perspective. It goes on to consider three contemporary developments - globalisation, urbanisation, and decentralisation - that impact the position of the city within the international society today. Subsequently, the focus is on how cities are (re)constituted as global actors by making use of the language, norms and practices of foreign policy and international law. In turn, as global actors, cities reconstitute the global society and its ideational, normative structure. A social constructivist approach is used here to explain both constitutive processes. The current urban renaissance challenges traditional state-centrism of the IR/lL theories describing the world. The editors of this volume have posed the research question as to whether we face ‘a moment of foreign policy transformation’; this chapter suggests we do. The renaissance of the city as an independent global actor attests to a more general shift from an international to a global society. Meanwhile, the (re-)constitution of the city as new foreign policy actor shows the persuasive power and constructive role of international legal norms and ideas today.
Recent developments in relation to the termination of international investment agreements (IIAs) raise a number of issues at the intersection of treaty law and investment law. This article examines some of the key aspects of treaty law as they relate to the termination of IIAs. The article addresses recent state practice in relation to the denunciation of or withdrawal from multi-party treaties related to investment including the ICSID Convention and the Energy Charter Treaty, leading to complicated questions about the effective date of termination and the implications for new or ongoing investment claims. The article also examines the unilateral termination of bilateral treaties, for example by South Africa and Indonesia, and the mutual termination of such treaties, for example within the European Union and as a result of conclusion of newer treaties such as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. In this regard, the article considers the consequences of sunset clauses, introduced because of the long-term nature of foreign investments, which can make it harder for States to extract themselves from investment obligations. These developments highlight the importance of clarity in drafting termination clauses and agreeing to terminate an IIA, so as to avoid disputes about the impact of a survival clause or its interaction with general treaty law.
