This book analyzes China’s attitude to international law based on historical experiences and documents, and provides an explanation of China’s approaches to international legal issues. It also establishes several elements for a possible framework of Chinese theory on international law.
This edited volume provides, for the first time, a comprehensive account of theoretical approaches to international punishment. Its main objective is to contribute to the development of a consistent and robust theory of international criminal punishment. For this purpose, the authors - renowned scholars in the fields of criminal law, international criminal law, and philosophy of law, as well as practitioners working at different international criminal courts and tribunals - address the question of meaning and purpose of punishment in international law from various perspectives. The volume fleshes out the predominant dimensions of a theory of international punishment and highlights the differences between 'ordinary' (domestic) crime and international crimes and their respective enforcement. At the same time, throughout the volume a major focus is on the practical consequences of the different theoretical approaches, in particular for the activities of the International Criminal Court.
This book is motivated by a question: when should international courts intervene in domestic affairs? To answer this question thoroughly, the book is broken down into a series of separate inquiries: when is intervention legitimate? When can international courts identify good legal solutions? When will intervention initiate useful processes? When will it lead to good outcomes? These inquiries are answered based on reviewing judgments of international courts, strategic analysis, and empirical findings. The book outlines under which conditions intervention by international courts is recommended and evaluates the implications that international courts have on society.
The Editorial Board of the Cambridge International Law Journal (CILJ) is pleased to invite submissions for Volume 9(2), to be published in December 2020. The Board welcomes long articles that engage with the timely theme of the Ninth Annual Cambridge International Law Conference, ‘International Law and Global Risks: Current Challenges in Theory and Practice’. Further information about the theme is available here. All submissions are subject to double-blind peer review by the Journal's Editorial Board. In addition, long articles are sent to the Academic Review Board, which consists of distinguished international law scholars and practitioners. Articles must be submitted by 11:59 pm on 11 May 2020 (BST).
For full submission instructions, please visit this link.
Long articles for Volume 9(2) can be submitted here.
Blog articles can be submitted here.
Further information can be obtained from the Editors-in-Chief at editors@cilj.co.uk.
The latest issue of Criminal Law Forum (Vol. 31, no. 1, March 2020) is out. Contents include:
This Handbook aims to provide practical guidance on good treaty practice. It presents a range of examples from the practice of several States and international organisations and explains the actions that need to be taken to create a new treaty, bring it into force, operate it, amend it and wind it up, on both the international and the domestic plane. It also explores what constitutes good treaty practice, and develops generic principles or criteria against which to evaluate these examples. It provides a useful analytical tool to enable each government and international organisation to identify and develop the best treaty practice for their circumstances, recognising that one size does not necessarily fit all. It will be of interest to those working with treaties and treaty procedures in governments, international organisations and legal practice, as well as legal academics and students wishing to gain insight into the realities of treaty practice.
This book offers a comprehensive analysis of the international law applicable to cyber operations, including a systematic examination of attribution, lawfulness and remedies. It demonstrates the importance of countermeasures as a form of remedies and also shows the limits of international law, highlighting its limits in resolving issues related to cyber operations. There are several situations in which international law leaves the victim State of cyber operations helpless. Two main streams of limits are identified. First, in the case of cyber operations conducted by non-state actors on the behalf of a State, new technologies offer various ways to coordinate cyber operations without a high level of organization. Second, the law of State responsibility offers a range of solutions to respond to cyber operations and seek reparation, but it does not provide an answer in every case and it cannot solve the problem related to technical capabilities of the victim.
Bosnien-Herzegowina, Kosovo, Afghanistan und Libyen sind der Öffentlichkeit maßgeblich als (Bürger-)Kriegsländer in Erinnerung. Untrennbar verbunden sind damit aber auch jene militärischen Interventionen des Nordatlantikbündnisses, die für eine Entwicklung der NATO vom Verteidigungsbündnis hin zur transatlantischen Interventionsstreitmacht stehen. Gleichermaßen markieren sie prototypisch die Fortentwicklung eines völkerrechtlichen Vertrages in seiner Handhabung fernab des Vertragstextes. Losgelöst vom Gründungsvertrag ist die NATO neuen Zwecken dienstbar gemacht worden, ohne dass sich diese »Umwidmung« in einer förmlichen Vertragsänderung niedergeschlagen hätte. Ausgehend von diesem Befund widmet sich die Arbeit der zentralen Fragestellung, in welchem Rahmen und unter welchen Voraussetzungen militärische Maßnahmen eines Verteidigungsbündnisses wie der NATO als rechtmäßig i.S.d. Völkerrechts anzusehen sind und wie weit der NATO-Vertrag als ein völkerrechtlicher Vertrag ausgelegt bzw. »fortgebildet« werden darf.
The question of 'humanitarian intervention' has been a staple of international law for around 200 years, with a renewed interest in the history of the subject emerging in the last twenty years. This book provides a chronological account of the evolution of the discussion and uncovers the fictional narrative provided by international lawyers to support their conclusions on the subject, from justifications and arguments for 'humanitarian intervention', the misrepresentation of great power involvement in the Greek War of Independence in 1827, to the 'humanitarian intervention that never was', India's war with Pakistan in 1971. Relying on a variety of sources, some of them made available in English for the first time, the book provides an undogmatic, alternative history of the fight for the protection of human rights in international law.
State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have long constituted, and are likely to remain, an important instrument in any government’s toolbox for a variety of economic and societal goals. However, the significant extent of state ownership among the world’s top companies, and the quantitative and qualitative transformation and hybrid nature of SOEs, raises the issue of their impact on international trade flows and the competitive process. This article addresses the question of how international trade agreements regulate SOEs, with a view to furthering the international contestability of markets, while, at the same time, allowing governments to provide support to SOEs as a means of dealing with market failures and the pursuit of public goals. After a brief introduction to contemporary state capitalism, the argument is developed in three main parts. The first part situates SOEs within the GATT and WTO frameworks and elaborates on the findings of previous literature with a view to highlighting the main shortcomings of such discipline. The second part re-examines the notion of ‘competitive neutrality’ by locating contemporary trade agreements within the larger contextual relationships between the state, the market, and the social, and thus reconstructs the normative rationales and general policy implications of the disciplines under examination. Against this background, the third part critically assesses the new disciplines on SOEs in recent preferential trading areas (PTAs). The main conclusion is that the search for binding rules has not led to balanced regimes and, despite the wider scope of the new rules, notable problems that have emerged within the WTO context remain unsolved.
The latest issue of Global Constitutionalism (Vol. 9, no. 1, March 2020) is out. Contents include:
What should be the role of law in response to the spread of artificial intelligence in war? Fuelled by both public and private investment, military technology is accelerating towards increasingly autonomous weapons, as well as the merging of humans and machines. Contrary to much of the contemporary debate, this is not a paradigm change; it is the intensification of a central feature in the relationship between technology and war: double elevation, above one’s enemy and above oneself. Elevation above one’s enemy aspires to spatial, moral, and civilizational distance. Elevation above oneself reflects a belief in rational improvement that sees humanity as the cause of inhumanity and de-humanization as our best chance for humanization. The distance of double elevation is served by the mechanization of judgement. To the extent that judgement is seen as reducible to algorithm, law becomes the handmaiden of mechanization. In response, neither a focus on questions of compatibility nor a call for a ‘ban on killer robots’ help in articulating a meaningful role for law. Instead, I argue that we should turn to a long-standing philosophical critique of artificial intelligence, which highlights not the threat of omniscience, but that of impoverished intelligence. Therefore, if there is to be a meaningful role for law in resisting double elevation, it should be law encompassing subjectivity, emotion and imagination, law irreducible to algorithm, a law of war that appreciates situated judgement in the wielding of violence for the collective.
This book develops a constitutional theory of international organization to explain the legitimation of supranational organizations. Supranational organizations play a key role in contemporary global governance, but recent events like Brexit and the threat by South Africa to withdraw from the International Criminal Court suggest that their legitimacy continues to generate contentious debates in many countries. Rethinking international organization as a constitutional problem, Oates argues that it is the representation of the constituent power of a constitutional order, that is, the collective subject in whose name authority is wielded, which explains the legitimation of supranational authority. Comparing the cases of the European Union, the World Trade Organization, and the International Criminal Court, Oates shows that the constitution of supranationalism is far from a functional response to the pressures of interdependence but a value-laden struggle to define the proper subject of global governance.
The latest issue of the International Journal of Transitional Justice (Vol. 14, no. 1, March 2020) is out. Contents include:
International investment disputes involving African States before the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) have generated significant critical inquiry. Yet, not enough academic literature has been devoted to accounting for the implications that arise from the disputes involving African States to the development of the ICSID case law and international investment law in general. This article addresses this gap by conceptualizing African States parties before ICSID tribunals as reverse contributors. While the article acknowledges the critiques of ICSID vis-à-vis African State parties, it contends that, over time, the involvement of African States in ICSID disputes has generated opportunities for the clarification, confirmation and development of ICSID jurisprudence. Although the article is not a case for African exceptionalism, it contributes to the dearth of materials that revisit the participation of African States before ICSID, while simultaneously acknowledging the need for reforms.
This book examines the engagement of African states with the United Nations Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review (UPR) mechanism. This human rights mechanism is known for its pacific and non-confrontational approach to monitoring state human rights implementation. Coming at the end of the first three cycles of the UPR, the work offers a detailed analysis of the effectiveness of African states’ engagement and its potential impact. It develops a framework which comprehensively evaluates aspects of states’ UPR engagement, such as the pre-review national consultation process and implementation of UPR recommendations which, until recently, have received little attention. The book considers the potential for acculturation in engagement with the UPR and unpacks the impact of politics, regionalism, cultural relativism, rights ritualism and civil society.
