The use of the concept of an exclusive Economie zone has increased since the adoption of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. However, the characterization of this zone varies greatly between States. This article presents an exhaustive survey of the concept of an exclusive Economie zone. The author discusses the types of jurisdiction exercised by States in their uses of an exclusive Economie zone. Disparity exists between the provisions of the Convention and State practice in some specific areas: for example, the provisions on the environment and on scientific research. Despite these exceptions, the author maintains that the basic tenets of the Convention are respected in State practice. State declarations as well as arbitral and judicial decisions show that the Convention and State practice are together evolving to reinforce the basic principles of the concept of an exclusive Economie zone.

Globalization has effectively enabled Canada’s domestically incorporated mining companies to escape the jurisdiction of the courts of the world, allowing them to carry out human rights abuses abroad with impunity. In February 2020, however, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark judgment, Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya, which attempted to address this jurisdictional gap. This decision held that Canadian corporations could potentially be liable under domestic law for breaches of customary international law perpetrated abroad. The decision has been criticized for straying too far from a classically positivist conception of international law. This article argues that such criticisms are well founded insofar as the majority’s judgment implicitly relies on progressive human-centric theories of international law without adequately addressing how these are reconcilable with international law as it is currently applied. It then explores the ideas that drive the majority’s opinion in order to propose two alternative approaches to holding corporations accountable that are more readily reconcilable with traditional state-centric conceptions of international law. Adopting these revised approaches could less contentiously lead to corporate accountability before future domestic courts. Finally, this article considers the potential international developments and repercussions to which this and other forward-looking decisions could lead.

The canadian plan suggested to the 21st session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in 1966 for re-allocating China's seat in the world Organization was designed to bring about a breakthrough in resolving a question of great complexity that has beset that Organization for some 17 years. It has attracted world-wide attention and evoked various comments by both practitioners and students of international politics.

Before analyzing the contents and denoting the legal and political implications of the plan, it is necessary to review briefly the background and the discussions of the question of China's representation at the 21st General Assembly.

In Geological Time a quarter of a century does not rate high on the scale of perspectives. But for law and lawyers, for ongoing politics and policies, twenty-five years in an age of electronic communications, ballistic missile speeds, and space activities can include a planetary march of revolutionary proportions. Indeed, the rise and fall of empires now may be counted in years or decades rather than in centuries. The paradox of our age is that the future marks a constant acceleration of political processes, with conservative forces such as law and other social controls hard put to keep up with escaping events. The compression of time at the end of the twentieth century is its dominant feature.

This article deals with the Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. In particular it analyzes the legal issues arising from the jurisdiction of the court’s proposed International Criminal Law Section over corporations. After underlining the historic opportunity represented by this initiative, the author points out a number of challenges that will necessarily arise when the court begins to operate. These problems are mainly related to the fact that criminal law has developed around the criminal liability of natural persons. Overcoming these challenges will require rethinking how to apply many of the basic principles that traditional criminal law has, until now, taken for granted.

The establishment of a compulsory dispute settlement mechanism in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is intended to be the guarantor of the proper application of the convention. Yet the decisions of courts and tribunals seized pursuant to the procedures under Section 2 of Part XV of UNCLOS are in many regards difficult to reconcile and in some regards unable to form the basis for a jurisprudence constante. This article examines on an empirical basis the scope and limits of the compulsory dispute settlement mechanism under UNCLOS, as applied by international courts and tribunals during a period of twenty years since the first decision in the Southern Bluefin Tuna case until the recent decision on preliminary objections in the Dispute Concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

In 1974 there took place in Geneva the first session of a diplomatic conference called by Switzerland at the instance of the International Committee of the Red Cross to update the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, particularly with a view to the more careful definition and exposition of what might be described as the fundamental humanitarian principles of law with regard to armed conflict. While it would be an unduly narrow assumption that humanitarian law is only relevant to an armed conflict, it must not be forgotten that breaches thereof are more likely to occur at such a time, for the man in the field has normally been trained to overthrow and if possible kill enemy personnel, even to the extent that occasionally his basic training may be in conflict with the requirements of the law of war. Generally speaking, the ordinary noncommissioned officer is unlikely to stress overmuch the restriction on the permitted means and methods of warfare to be found in the Regulations attached to Hague Convention IV of 1907. Moreover, the ideological campaigns which accompany any major war, with comments by politicians, commanders, and media alike, implying that the enemy has resorted to conduct that might only be expected from those who have placed themselves outside the protection of law or morality accompanied by insulting nicknames that suggest the enemy is not even human, all contribute to the ordinary soldier's idea that destruction of the enemy is the aim and the end regardless of the means employed to achieve it. Examples of this type of situation may be seen in both world wars, as well as in relation to the campaigns in Korea and Vietnam. However, international law has always recognized that there is a law of war and that breaches thereof may result in punishment. The simplest means of imposing such punishment, without at the same time appearing to abandon all sense of legal propriety, is by way of the trial of war criminals.

This article reviews the “gaps” that allow for the creation of the “offshore” in international law and argues that these are instead constituted by constraints on our spatial imaginary of law than by any “real” gaps between state jurisdictions. The modern practices of sovereignty by states and non-state actors are at odds with the implicit geography of international law that assumes a static and fixed concept of territory. By rethinking the relevant legal spaces of international law and the sovereign practices that constitute the supposedly deterritorialized offshore, we can see that the offshore is actually onshore somewhere; we can reterritorialize the supposed deterritorialized competences. This article identifies a desynchronization between state territories and the actual exercise of sovereignty that presents as pseudo deterritorialization. Yet if both the concept of sovereignty and the implicit geography of international law confirm and reinforce one another in international law discourse, international lawyers are blind to the changing “landscape” of sovereignty in international law.

In its August 1998 reference, Reference Re Secession ofQuébec, the Supreme Court of Canada discussed thetopic of the international recognition of Québec.The authors argue that the Court is incorrect in itssuggestion that recognition is a precondition forstatehood, confusing legal and political factors. Inthe authors’ view, the introduction of the conceptof international recognition by the Court is anattempt to provide a sanction against unilateralsecession and to back up the Court’s view that thereis an obligation to negotiate any departure byQuébec. The result, the authors consider, isunsatisfying for it leads the Court into legal errorand political conjecture.

Les marchés publics sont essentiellement régulés ou réglementés, au niveau mondial, par l’Accord plurilatéral sur les marchés publics de l’OMC (AMP). Cet Accord est aujourd’hui sur le point de prendre un nouvel envol, car les négociations dont il faisait l’objet ont abouti à la fin de l’année 2011 et l’AMP révisé est entré en vigueur le 6 avril 2014. Bien que l’entrée en vigueur de l’AMP révisé insuffle un élan vigoureux à l’ouverture des marchés, elle ne constitue toutefois pas la fin du processus visant à libéraliser les marchés publics. Afin de comprendre la nécessité de négocier de façon quasi permanente une libéralisation accrue des marchés publics et d’apprécier pleinement l’importance de l’AMP révisé pour l’économie mondiale, cet article décrit succinctement les événements marquants de l’histoire des négociations internationales visant à libéraliser les marchés publics et présente ensuite, d’une façon générale, les principaux éléments du texte de l’AMP révisé. De plus, cet article contient une analyse approfondie des listes d’engagements des Parties à l’AMP révisé (les annexes à l’Appendice I) car, malgré une certaine simplification résultant de la conclusion des négociations, cette partie de l’AMP révisé demeure particulièrement technique et complexe. Ces renseignements et observations connexes pourraient, d’une part, apporter une aide aux décideurs confrontés à des choix dans ce domaine et, d’autre part, aider à identifier les débouchés à l’exportation qui sont susceptibles d’intéresser les fournisseurs des Parties à l’AMP et des autres Membres de l’OMC désirant accéder à l’Accord.

For twenty years, both Canada and the United States were non-parties to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention). In 2003, Canada finally ratified the LOS Convention, leaving the United States as the only industrialized state that was not a party to the “constitution of the oceans.” Canada's perspective on the US non-party status involves an equal measure of frustration/disappointment, appreciation/understanding, and ambivalence.

A first reading of the majority opinion in the South West Africa Cases, Second Phase, may leave the Common Law reader with the feeling of having waded through the marshes of a pre-Judicature Act search for a form of action in which to frame this case; the plaintiff having failed to find the proper writ, the defendant's demurrer is thereby upheld. The extremely technical, indeed artificial, nature of the International Court of Justice's judgment of 1966 has already stirred controversy, but one suspects that the heat of debate will cool rapidly out of sheer frustration with this judgment. Many writers will assume the attitude of Judge Wellington Koo who said in his dissenting opinion that “There is a Chinese proverb put in the form of a question: Why write a long and big essay on such a small subject?” In labouring to bring forth its largest judgment yet (500 pages), the International Court of Justice has engaged in what Judge Jessup, in his excellent dissenting opinion, called a “procedure of utter futility.”

The executive directors of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), having formulated a Convention on the Settlement of Investment Disputes between States and Nationals of Other States, approved on March 18, 1965 the submission of the text of the Convention to member governments of the Bank. This action represents a milestone in the efforts of several international organizations to achieve some sort of harmony in an area of international economic development where there has been manifest disunity. The arbitration of private investment disputes has strong legal and political undertones, for it is set against a background of friction between capital-exporting countries that always seek to protect the interests of their nationals abroad, and capital-importing countries that normally recognize a need for foreign private capital to bolster their economic development, yet are wary of allowing external mechanisms to encroach on their sovereign jurisdiction within their own territory.

From 1872 until 1913 legal education in Manitoba was dependent almost entirely on apprenticeship, supplemented by private study. In 1913 the Law Society of Manitoba organized an improved programme of lectures for intending members of the bar and in 1914 the society entered into an agreement with the University of Manitoba to create and operate jointly the Manitoba Law School. The school's expenses were to be shared equally by the two parent bodies and its operations were to be supervised by a board of trustees consisting of two appointees chosen by each body and a chairman elected by the appointees. The school was modelled on the Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and offered a three-year lecture course leading to both the LL.B. degree and admission to practice. As at Osgoode Hall, enrolment at the law school was not regarded as a substitute for service under articles. Classes were held in the morning and late afternoon and students were expected to carry out office duties during the remainder of the day.