Webinar Series: Climate Change and International Economic Law: Where are we headed?

A webinar series will be held on November 3, 6, and 8, 2023, on “Climate Change and International Economic Law: Where are we headed?”, sponsored by the University of Göttingen, the University of Bern, and the Università della Svizzera Italiana. Details are here.

New Issue: Stanford Journal of International Law

The latest issue of the Stanford Journal of International Law (Vol. 59, no. 2, Summer 2023) is out. Contents include:

• Erik G. Jensen & Kazumi Hoshino-MacDonald, Is Taliban 2.0 Closing the Gates to Ijtihad Again?
• Patrick Leisure, Europe's Schoolhouse Gate? Strasbourg, Schools, and the European Convention on Human Rights
• Melissa Stewart, Cascading Consequences of Sinking States

New Issue: Harvard International Law Journal

The latest issue of the Harvard International Law Journal (Vol. 64, no. 2, Summer 2023) is out. Contents include:

• David Hughes & Yahli Shereshevsky, State-Academic Lawmaking
• Lisa J. Laplante, The Wild West of Company-Level Grievance Mechanisms: Drawing Normative Borders to Patrol the Privatization of Human Rights Remedies
• Gershon Hasin, From "Space Law" to "Space Governance": A Policy-Oriented Perspective on International Law and Outer Space Activities
• Shitong Qiao, Finance against Law: The Case of China

Buitelaar: Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo

Tom Buitelaar (Leiden Univ. - Institute of Security and Global Affairs) has published Assisting International Justice: Cooperation Between UN Peace Operations and the International Criminal Court in the Democratic Republic of Congo (Oxford Univ. Press 2023). Here's the abstract:

Although the International Criminal Court (ICC) - as the only permanent international court that addresses crimes against humanity, genocide, and war crimes - has important potential to end impunity and find justice for victims of atrocities, it is dependent on others for almost all aspects of its functioning. The Court has frequently relied on the peacekeeping operations that the UN deploys in the field and, over the past two decades, UN peacekeepers have provided logistical assistance and security to Court investigators, shared large amounts of information, and have even been involved in the arrest of Court suspects. But their track record has been inconsistent: they have sometimes refused to take action against people accused of war crimes and have found it difficult to balance their impartiality with court prosecutions. Despite the empirical importance of this phenomenon, we know preciously little about the circumstances under which it occurs.

In Assisting International Justice, Buitelaar reveals the conditions under which UN peacekeepers address impunity in their mission areas. He presents an original single-country case study of assistance provided by the UN mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and a plausibility probe of other peace operations in ICC situation countries. Relying on new empirical material, including over 130 interviews of key decision-makers, and comprehensive archival research, this scholarly volume explores how the UN navigates the terrain of conflict mediation and punitive accountability and demonstrates the collaborative but contingent relationship between the UN and the ICC.

AJIL Unbound Symposium: Saunders's “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-War Inheritance”

AJIL Unbound has posted a symposium on Anna Saunders's “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-War Inheritance.” The symposium includes an introduction by Gráinne de Burca and contributions by Babatunde Fagbayibo, Michele Krech, Gaurav Mukherjee, Hannah Birkenkötter, Bojan Bugaric, and David Dyzenhaus.

Bass: Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia

Gary J. Bass (Princeton Univ. - Politics and International Affairs) has published Judgment at Tokyo: World War II on Trial and the Making of Modern Asia (Knopf 2023). Here's the abstract:

In the weeks after Japan finally surrendered to the Allies to end World War II, the world turned to the question of how to move on from years of carnage and destruction. For Harry Truman, Douglas MacArthur, Chiang Kai-shek, and their fellow victors, the question of justice seemed clear: Japan’s militaristic leaders needed to be tried and punished for the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor; shocking atrocities against civilians in China, the Philippines, and elsewhere; and rampant abuses of prisoners of war in notorious incidents such as the Bataan death march. For the Allied powers, the trial was an opportunity to render judgment on their vanquished foes, but also to create a legal framework to prosecute war crimes and prohibit the use of aggressive war, building a more peaceful world under international law and American hegemony. For the Japanese leaders on trial, it was their chance to argue that their war had been waged to liberate Asia from Western imperialism and that the court was victors’ justice.

For more than two years, lawyers for both sides presented their cases before a panel of clashing judges from China, India, the Philippines, and Australia, as well as the United States and European powers. The testimony ran from horrific accounts of brutality and the secret plans to attack Pearl Harbor to the Japanese military’s threats to subvert the government if it sued for peace. Yet rather than clarity and unanimity, the trial brought complexity, dissents, and divisions that provoke international discord between China, Japan, and Korea to this day. Those courtroom tensions and contradictions could also be seen playing out across Asia as the trial unfolded in the crucial early years of the Cold War, from China’s descent into civil war to Japan’s successful postwar democratic elections to India’s independence and partition.

Conference: The Italian Scholars and The Hague Academy of International Law

On November 30, 2023, a conference on "The Italian Scholars and The Hague Academy of International Law - A retrospective on the occasion of the Academy’s Centennial Anniversary" will take place at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, in cooperation with Università Roma Tre. Details are here.

Conversation: Arguing Cases before International Courts and Tribunals

On November 24, 2023, Bocconi University will host, in the hybrid format, a conversation on "Arguing Cases before International Courts and Tribunals." Details are here.