Volume 388 of the Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law is out. Contents include:
Most discourses on victims in international criminal justice take the subject of victims for granted, as an identity and category existing exogenously to the judicial process. This book takes a different approach. Through a close reading of the institutional practices of one particular court, it demonstrates how court practices produce the subjectivity of the victim, a subjectivity that is profoundly of law and endogenous to the enterprise of international criminal justice. Furthermore, by situating these figurations within the larger aspirations of the court, the book shows how victims have come to constitute and represent the link between international criminal law and the enterprise of transitional justice. The book takes as its primary example the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC), or the Khmer Rouge Tribunal as it is also called. Focusing on the representation of victims in crimes against humanity, victim participation and photographic images, the book engages with a range of debates and scholarship in law, feminist theory and cultural legal theory. Furthermore, by paying attention to a broader range of institutional practices, Figuring Victims makes an innovative scholarly contribution to the debates on the roles and purposes of international criminal justice.
The accession of the People's Republic of China to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 significantly transformed the global economy both de facto and de jure. At the regional level, China's WTO accession served as an important catalyst for the establishment of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) in East Asia. This was a novel development for the region, since East Asian States had previously followed a largely informal, market-driven approach to regional economic integration. By contrast, rules-based economic integration involving East Asian States was traditionally limited to multilateral integration under the GATT/WTO framework.
This book systematically analyses and explains the development, nature and challenges of rules-based regional economic integration in East Asia with particular attention to the region's first four RTAs. While also addressing the socio-economic, historical and political factors influencing the development of RTAs in East Asia, the book focuses on the legal institutions governing economic integration in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), as well as under the ASEAN–China Comprehensive Economic Co-Operation Agreement (ACFTA), the Japan–Singapore New Age Economic Partnership Agreement (JSEPA), and the Mainland China–Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA). The book provides a systematic, comparative account of the scope, depth and (hard law versus soft law) quality of rules-based economic integration achieved under these four RTAs in the areas of trade in goods and services, investment liberalisation and protection, labour movement, and dispute settlement.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Human Rights (Vol. 22, no. 6, 2018) is out. Contents include:
Volume 387 of the Recueil des Cours, Collected Courses of the Hague Academy of International Law is out. Contents include:
Die von der Bundesrepublik Deutschland abgeschlossenen völkerrechtlichen Verträge haben sich seit Inkrafttreten des Grundgesetzes vervielfacht und betreffen viele Rechtsbereiche, die ehemals dem nationalen Gesetzgeber überlassen waren. Der Abschluss völkerrechtlicher Verträge erfolgt nach dem Grundgesetz durch die Exekutive unter Beteiligung der Legislative. Zur Beteiligung der Legislative bei der Einlegung von Vorbehalten zu und der Kündigung von völkerrechtlichen Verträgen enthält das Grundgesetz keine explizite Regelung. Juliane Hettche legt die vorhandenen Regelungen des Grundgesetzes nach Wortlaut, Historie, Systematik und Teleologie aus. Sie überträgt die Grundsätze, die das Zusammenwirken von Legislative und Exekutive im Innenverhältnis prägen, auf das Außenverhältnis. Daraus leitet sie sowohl Zustimmungs- als auch Initiativrechte der Legislative bei der Einlegung von Vorbehalten zu und der Kündigung von völkerrechtlichen Verträgen her.
This book represents the first multi-disciplinary introduction to the study of war crimes trials and investigations. It introduces readers to the numerous disciplines engaged with this complex subject, including: Forensic Anthropology, Economics and Anthropometrics, Legal History, Violence Studies, International Criminal Justice, International Relations, and Moral Philosophy. The contributors are experts in their respective fields and the chapters highlight each discipline’s major trends, debates, methods and approaches to mass atrocity, genocide, and crimes against humanity, as well as their interactions with adjacent disciplines. Case studies illustrate how the respective disciplines work in practice, including examples from the Allied Hunger Blockade, WWII, the Guatemalan and Spanish Civil Wars, the Former Yugoslavia, and Uganda. Including bibliographical essays to offer readers crucial orientation when approaching the specialist literature in each case, this edited collection equips readers with what they need to know in order to navigate a complex, and until now, deeply fragmented field.
Confronting recalcitrant and even hostile governments is nothing new for international human rights courts, treaty bodies, and other monitoring mechanisms. Yet there is a growing sense that the recent turn to populism in several countries poses a new type of threat that international human rights law (IHRL) institutions are ill equipped to meet. The concerns range in scope and intensity—from criticisms of specific rulings or legal doctrines, to predictions of backlash against particular courts or review bodies, to warnings that major sections of the institutional edifice of IHRL are in danger of collapse. Part 1 of this essay identifies several facilitating conditions that have, until recently, supported IHRL institutions. Part 2 considers several distinctive challenges that populism poses to those institutions. Part 3 identifies a range of legal and political tools that might be deployed to address those challenges and explores their efficacy and potential risks. Part 4 concludes that IHRL institutions should adopt survival strategies for the age of populism and it preliminarily sketches what those strategies might look like.
Although the legitimacy of investor-state arbitration has come under fire, states have not (yet) converged on which reforms to pursue. In simplified terms, three main camps have emerged to date:
1. Incrementalists view the criticisms of the current system as overblown and argue that investor-state arbitration remains the best option available. Hence, they favor retaining the existing dispute resolution system but instituting modest reforms that would redress specific concerns.
2. Systemic reformers see merit in retaining investors’ ability to file claims directly on the international level, but view investor-state arbitration as a seriously flawed system for dealing with such claims. They champion more significant, systemic reforms, such as replacing investor-state arbitration with a multilateral investment court and appellate body.
3. Paradigm shifters dismiss the existing system as irrevocably flawed and in need of wholesale replacement. They reject the utility of investors’ making international claims against states, whether before arbitral tribunals or international courts. They embrace a variety of alternatives, such as domestic courts, ombudsmen, and state-to-state arbitration.
Against this backdrop, the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) gave one of its working groups a three-staged mandate to investigate the possible reform of investor-state dispute settlement, which required it, first, to identify and consider concerns about investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS); second, to consider whether reform was desirable in light of any identified concerns; and, third, if reform was desirable, to develop relevant solutions to be recommended to the Commission.
This essay (1) conceptualizes the three main reform approaches that have been advocated to date and identifies the likely strategies of, and risks faced by, the different reform champions; and (2) analyzes UNCITRAL’s role in these reforms as both a venue and an actor navigating a complex series of relationships with other key stakeholders. Pointing to the future, I conclude by identifying the likelihood of ongoing pluralism with respect to different institutional processes for resolving investment disputes and sketching how actors might proceed to develop flexibility both among and within different reform options.
Human rights laws, both international and domestic, present a challenge to the sovereign rights of states. The right to determine who may enter a state is one of the fundamental attributes of sovereignty. Under international law, however, states cannot return a migrant with a potentially valid asylum claim to a place where his life will be in danger, and cannot return any migrant to a place where he might be tortured. States often detain migrants while processing their asylum claims, and pending deportation if those claims should fail. Yet international law, and many states’ domestic laws, prohibit prolonged detention and restrict detention conditions. As migration flows and detention rates have swelled globally, high courts have increasingly decided cases involving the rights of detained migrants. On February 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a critical decision on this issue in Jennings v. Rodriguez, allowing thousands of immigrants and asylum seekers to be detained indefinitely, without bail hearings, while remanding the case for consideration of their constitutional claims. This article compares court cases involving detention of migrants in the U.S., Australia, and Europe to determine how states can legally comply with human rights norms while preserving their right to protect their borders. Based on these cases, the article proposes best practices for state compliance with international law on detention. This comparison illuminates how courts strike a delicate balance between human rights and state sovereignty where national security interests are at stake.
Despite its central contribution to the construction of the global legal order, the United States has long been perceived to exclude itself from its reach. Its exceptionalist image has been reinforced by statements of political leaders, federal law provisions and court decisions. This article argues, however, that in order to appropriately assess a state’s approach to international law, one must consider not only the position of its formal government, but also the interpretation, application, and challenge of international law by sub-state actors.
Studying a U.S. policy-making process initiated pursuant to a World Trade Organization ruling, the article surveys interventions by government officials, consumers, producers and civil society organizations. It shows, contrary to the exceptionalist image, that U.S. actors of all stripes invoked and relied on international law extensively, thereby carving a space for it as a non-negligible consideration in the process. The article thus submits that accounting for non-state stakeholders is imperative in evaluating the regard for international law in a state and possibly also the domestic impact of international law.
This article examines the development of the concept of recognition in the writings of British jurists. It first outlines methodologies of conceptual history as applied to international legal concepts, before examining four strands of development of the concept of recognition from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. It shows how the concept of recognition moved from examining intra-European diplomatic disagreements, to a focus on Christianity, civilisation and progress that barred non-European communities, to a late colonial-era emphasis on technicalities of government and territory, and eventually a state-centric account that normalised inferiority into difference, before emerging in the interwar period as a ‘basic concept’ of international law: intensely debated and closely tied to a range of political projects. The article concludes with reflections on why British thinking turns away from recognition in the 1950s, as the decolonising world turns to a new international law and self-determination.
What can Marxist theory contribute to the discipline of international legal studies? Can one be a Marxist and an international lawyer at the same time? What place is there for international legal scholarship in Marxist politics? How can Marxist international law theory position itself vis-à-vis other critical legal traditions? Does Marxism have any theoretical gaps that it needs to fill? How does a Marxist approach to international law differ from a New Left one? In this review essay, I propose to explore these and other related questions by examining one of the most important recent contributions to the Marxist debate about international law, the new edition of B.S. Chimni’s International Law and World Order. My aim in these pages is to reveal and bring to the surface its general critical method, some of the less obvious aspects of its underlying theoretical project, its disciplinary ambition as well as its overall place in the broader landscape of contemporary international law thought, including its relationship with other works of Marxist international law theory.
States have a significant influence on the selection of judges to international courts. This raises the concern that judges will be biased in favor of their home states, a concern backed by some empirical research. To counter that danger, international courts usually sit in large and diverse panels. Scholars have argued that this gives judges only rare occasions to tip the balance in favor of their home states. The problem begins, however, when judges start forming coalitions among themselves, giving judges with national biases a practical possibility to change the result of cases. To assess the magnitude of this threat to judicial independence, the paper draws on decades of scholarship in the field of judicial behavior. By understanding how judges behave, scholars can come closer to deciphering the true impact of judicial selection to international courts on international judgments.
Le fait que des enfants se joignent aux forces armées ou à des groupes armés non étatiques est une terrible réalité qui résiste aux efforts de la communauté internationale pour l’éliminer. La participation directe aux hostilités par des enfants-soldats constitue possiblement l’aspect le plus troublant de cette réalité, en ce qu’elle soulève la possibilité de devoir attaquer directement ces enfants. Le droit international humanitaire reste à ce jour plutôt discret quant à cette facette de la participation des enfants aux conflits armés, laissant les forces armées improviser leur réaction. Les Forces armées canadiennes ont adopté en 2017 ce qui est présenté comme la première doctrine militaire sur les enfants-soldats. Le présent texte propose une analyse de cette doctrine à la lumière de la réglementation de l’emploi de la force contre les enfants-soldats en droit international humanitaire, pour déterminer si les enfants peuvent jamais devenir des combattants à part entière, à quelles conditions ils peuvent être considérés comme civils participant directement aux hostilités, et quelles limites le droit humanitaire impose quant aux choix des moyens et mesures de guerre employés.
The fact that children are drawn to join the ranks of armed forces or non-state armed groups is a scourge that persists despite concerted efforts to eradicate the practice. No facet of this reality is perhaps more shocking than children’s direct participation in hostility, in that it raises the spectre of combatants directly targeting children. International humanitarian law has been largely silent on this specific aspect of child soldiering, leaving armed forces to improvise their stance when confronted with child soldiers on the battlefield. The Canadian Armed Forces in 2017 adopted what is said to be the first official military doctrine on child soldiers. This article analyzes this doctrine in light of the regulation of the use of force against child soldiers under international humanitarian law. It assesses whether children can ever be full-fledge combatants, when they can be considered civilians directly participating in hostilities, and, if children can be directly targeted, what limits humanitarian law imposes on the means and measures of war employed against them.
By purporting to depoliticize markets, international economic law complicates solutions to precarity and inequality within and between states and regions. Separating out markets from ordinary politics, the novel legal orders of trade and investment choose winners and losers, determining who will adapt to whom so as to render their policy goals most efficacious. In so doing, trade and investment law expresses preferences about how political and social life should be organized, rendering solutions to pressing social problems more difficult to address. This chapter interrogates these two legal regimes, arguing that they exhibit a similar tilt that favours global capital, precipitating similar legitimacy problems, and kindred responses that aim to manage the fall out. They reveal, in other words, startling comparable trajectories that rely on similar techniques to manage resistance. International economic law’s plan of action turns out to be unified: to deflect critique, disarm states, and weaponize legal rules. We conclude that, so long as international economic law does not take precarity and inequality seriously, its trade and investment regimes will remain vulnerable to political blowback.
Die Vereinten Nationen sind eine Organisation über allem Recht. Dieser Eindruck könnte sich aufdrängen, möchte man die Vereinten Nationen vor einem nationalen Gericht für ihr Fehlverhalten im Rahmen ihrer Friedensmissionen zur Verantwortung ziehen. Denn sogar angesichts schwerster Menschenrechtsverletzungen, können sich die Vereinten Nationen noch auf ihre Immunität berufen. Das mussten die Hinterbliebenen eines Völkermordes im Srebrenica-Verfahren schmerzlich erfahren. Nach Artikel 105 UN-Charta jedoch genießen die Vereinten Nationen nur solche Immunitäten, »die zur Verwirklichung ihrer Ziele notwendig sind«. Ihre Immunität scheint daher funktional begrenzt. Kann und soll die Immunität die Vereinten Nationen daher auch vor dem Vorwurf schützen, Menschenrechte in eklatanter Weise verletzt zu haben? Jakub Krumrey geht dieser Frage nach und untersucht, ob zumindest alternative Rechtsschutzmöglichkeiten für die Anspruchsteller bestehen.
