On 16 June 2004 Trial Chamber III of the ICTY issued a judgement on a motion for dismissal of charges in the Milošević case. Brought forward by the amici curiae appointed by the trial chamber, the motion for acquittal achieved limited success. While some allegations were dismissed, particularly with respect to the Bosnia Indictment, overall, the trial chamber found that the prosecution had led sufficient evidence to support each of the counts challenged in the three indictments against the accused. This article highlights some of the significant developments in the trial's first two years and the issues raised in the motion for acquittal, as well as the trial chamber's determination.

States can accept the jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice with respect to all or certain categories of legal disputes by means of unilateral declarations. This article examines the reservations to the acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction that states include in such declarations. It reviews the practice of states and traces the trends in drafting and adopting reservations. It also analyzes the jurisprudence of the Permanent Court of International Justice and the International Court of Justice in relation to the interpretation of various reservations, particularly in recent cases, illustrating the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of different types of reservations.

There is a broad political consensus that states must not facilitate money laundering, especially as relates to the proceeds of foreign grand corruption. Over the past 30 years, an elaborate regulatory regime has been put in place in most countries to ensure that proceeds of crime are interdicted and confiscated. It rests on the technically non-binding recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, an influential intergovernmental grouping. Despite this progress and the adoption of international treaties against corruption and organized crime, international law contains no express treaty rule that enjoins states from facilitating money laundering. Furthermore, there are formidable legal and practical obstacles to invoking international legal responsibility of states that do choose to benefit from enabling money laundering. This article explores the disconnect between international law as it stands and the widely accepted political imperative that states must not facilitate money laundering. It argues in favour of recognizing a self-standing customary rule to that effect, and outlines the content and likely impact of such a rule.

The Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA) was established at the first Hague Peace Conference in 1899. During the past decade the PCA has progressed from a period of relative inactivity to a previously unsurpassed caseload. In this article the Secretary-General of the PCA reflects on the creation and early development of the PCA, before giving a detailed overview of recent arbitrations conducted under PCA auspices. The first part of this review, concerning treaty-based arbitration, analyses the role of the PCA in the resolution of disputes under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, illustrated by the arbitrations conducted in the Guyana/Suriname, Barbados/Trinidad, Malaysia/Singapore, and Ireland/United Kingdom (MOX Plant) disputes. The second part, which focuses on ad hoc arbitration, outlines the recently concluded arbitrations in the Iron Rhine (Belgium/Netherlands) and Eritrea/Yemen cases, as well as the work of the Eritrea–Ethiopia Boundary Commission and Claims Commission.

Hunger and food insecurity are viewed as global problems, requiring global responses. Even though there is no distinct field of ‘international food law’, many areas of international law in some way deal with issues related to global hunger and food insecurity. Hunger and food insecurity are immensely complex problems that cannot possibly be understood and addressed through an inherently limited disciplinary perspective. This article argues that food regime theory – an analytical tool developed and used mostly in the field of sociology – can provide a useful means through which to better lay bare the role of international law in constituting global food relations. If international lawyers are serious about contributing to reducing global hunger and realizing food security, it is imperative to situate international law and its specialized fields within the broader political economy of food.

The ICJ in its judgments on the preliminary objections in the Legality of Use of Force cases held that it had no jurisdiction to hear the claims. Despite the unanimous concurrence in that result, it is clear that there were deep divisions within the Court as to the ground on which that decision should have been reached; only a bare majority subscribed to the reasoning that the Court was required to rule on the question of its jurisdiction ratione personae in relation to Serbia and Montenegro's uncertain status within the United Nations prior to 2000. The minority judges were highly critical of the choice of that basis of decision, in particular given its apparent implications for other cases pending before the Court.

The drafters of the Rome Statute sought to accord human rights a central place within the legal framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC). This was done not only through numerous provisions on the rights of the accused, victims, and witnesses, but also through the inclusion of the overarching Article 21(3) of the Rome Statute. Article 21(3) Rome Statute requires that the interpretation and application of all ICC law be consistent with internationally recognized human rights. While this provision has been employed on numerous occasions to bolster human rights protection in the ICC legal framework, it is not without its limits. In a series of decisions over the past few years, ICC judges have placed limits on the protections that can be read into the ICC legal framework on the basis of Article 21(3). Beyond stating that the ICC ‘is not a human rights court’, the decisions in question articulate no clear justification for the limitations imposed on Article 21(3). The present article analyses these decisions and identifies the underlying rationale for the Court’s approach: the principle of speciality. However, the picture is further complicated by the judges’ willingness to overlook the principle of speciality when particularly serious violations of human rights are involved. This leaves the precise contours of human rights protection in the ICC legal framework undefined.

International human rights law norms and ‘human-rightist’ imperatives are increasingly ‘mainstreamed’ into general international law. The writer makes two modest assertions: that the success of this trend (i) makes it now possible to speak of general international law ‘sources’ of human rights obligations; and (ii) undermines claims of the ‘specialness’ of the human rights legal framework, which are a source of perplexity for the general international lawyer increasingly used to taking human rights law (as lex generalis) into account when interpreting and applying general international law.

This article examines the challenges surrounding the enforcement of decisions of international courts, using the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) as the fulcrum of the analysis. When sitting in its original jurisdiction, the CCJ adjudicates claims arising from the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and the operation of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy. However, there is no clear route for the enforcement of original jurisdiction decisions. The Agreement Establishing the CCJ leaves the issue of enforcement to the states themselves, who in turn have either failed to enact enforcement legislation or have provided for enforcement to be carried out ‘in like manner’ as the decisions of domestic courts. This phraseology raises the spectre of the Crown Proceedings Act and its legislative progeny which bar the pursuit of enforcement proceedings against the state. Several solutions to this enforcement conundrum are discussed, ranging from a regional enforcement treaty, akin to the New York Convention, to enforcement at common law using the Fick case, with the merits and demerits of each examined in turn.

Since the late 1980s, governments have increasingly relied on the services of private military and security companies (PMSCs) in attaining their defence and foreign-policy objectives. States with advanced armed forces (notably the US and UK but also many others) have seen the outsourcing of various support functions, such as logistics or communications, as a way of cutting costs. Conversely, states with weak militaries (for example, Croatia at the time of the break-up of Yugoslavia and Angola during the civil war) have used PMSCs to boost their actual war-fighting capabilities. More recently, international organizations and non-governmental organizations have also turned to PMSCs, largely to ensure the safety of their humanitarian operations in zones of conflict.

Judge Buergenthal argues that the increased acceptance by states of international human rights obligations proclaimed in UN and regional treaties, reinforced by the jurisprudence of international and regional tribunals, accounts for the substantial progress that has been made in the protection of human rights throughout the world. The resultant political significance of international human rights law and the international community's growing expectation of compliance with that law explain why states engaging in large-scale human rights violations increasingly risk serious political and economic consequences for such practices. A state's continuing non-compliance with its international human rights obligations tends also to lead to the gradual loss by its government of the national and international legitimacy it needs in order to govern, which may in time contribute to its fall.

Many of the conflicts that have led to the creation of hybrid tribunals were identity-based conflicts – people who identified as members of one tribe, race, ethnicity, or religion used these distinctions as grounds to attack and persecute another group who often responded in kind. This reality means that the criminal justice processes that take place in the wake of such conflicts must take issues of identity seriously to be effective. This article uses the notion of framing contests to examine different identity-based responses to international justice. Defenders of the tribunals seek to portray them as impartial observers while critics paint them as illegitimate outsiders. Because hybrid tribunals have identity considerations as features built into them, they are better suited to promote their own legitimacy in these framing contests. These features include the personnel they use, the witnesses they call, the strategies their prosecutors deploy, and their local outreach programmes. Each of these tools can be used to frame the tribunal as a legitimate means to promote criminal justice and thereby advance the values of transitional justice.

In a small note which Peter Kooijmans wrote to me in answer to a letter in which I congratulated him with his election as Judge in the International Court of Justice – the first Netherlands Judge in the Court after World War II apart from Professor Riphagen who only served as a Judge ad hoc in the Barcelona Traction, Light and Power Company Ltd. case – he stated that he considered himself to be a privileged man. Privileged, because the new position would allow him to continue to remain active in the field of international law considerably beyond the retirement age of 65 which applies to professors of international law and most other people in The Netherlands. Privileged, I would like to add, also in another respect. Very rarely it will be given to one person in his lifetime to fulfil so many different honourable positions in the field of international law and international relations at such a high level of responsibility as has been the case with Peter Kooijmans: Professor of public international law, United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, State Secretary (Staatssecretaris) for Foreign Affairs, in particular disarmament matters (1973–1977), Minister for Foreign Affairs and, finally, Judge in the International Court of Justice.

Despite repeated attempts to eliminate statelessness and to provide for the protection of stateless persons, international law has not been able to provide an adequate response to these problems. In the Middle East the problem has continued to grow as social and political change pushes people into becoming stateless and fails to provide those who are stateless with adequate protection. The treaties that have attempted to prevent this practice have failed. At the same time the lex specialis aimed at protecting people from the consequences of statelessness have also failed. The result has been a lacuna in the protection of stateless persons. This article suggests that a step towards filling this gap might be made by applying general international human rights law to protect stateless persons.

In this article, the author gives an overview of the main international legal norms that are relevant to imputiny for human rights violations, and their actual implementation, in order to answer the question whether imputiny is indeed in violation of present day general international law. In this context, attention will also be given to the development towards the establishment of an international criminal tribunal.

When an international criminal tribunal establishes its headquarters in a state, its legal relationship with that state must be carved out. This legal relationship has the potential to exclude the applicability of human rights protection by curtailing the host state's jurisdiction in parts of its territory. Despite this, there is little clarity as to when when such curtailment should arise. This problem is illustrated by the situation regarding witnesses at the International Criminal Court, which has recently been the subject of decisions of the Hague District Court and of the European Court of Human Rights. These two courts disagree on the threshold at which the human rights issues engaged by the situation are brought under the jurisdiction of the Netherlands. This article submits that the European Court in Djokaba Lambi Longa v. The Netherlands set the threshold for jurisdiction under the Convention too high. In applying easily distinguishable previous case law, and failing to take into account all relevant facts, the Court's finding of inadmissibility is unconvincing. The Dutch Court, on the other hand, took a broader approach from which the European Court of Human Rights could learn. Ultimately the two decisions give contrasting interpretations of the relationship between the ICC and its host state, which could have wider ramifications.

Taslim Elias's scholarship on the impact of English common law on the growth of African customary law illustrates the intersectionality negotiated between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, universal and subaltern laws. His intellectual portrait is also useful as a heuristic device to excise the doctrines, strategies, imageries, and narratives of progress elaborated about ‘Africa’ and ‘law’. Elias decried the contempt and ignorance exhibited by colonial masters towards native customs and laws; he also vilified judicially crafted ‘repugnancy’ and ‘public policy’ doctrines as instruments of colonial policy to prevent British justice from looking both ways, by ensuring that British standards were the ‘objective’ criteria of abrogation and change. Yet he nonetheless saw these doctrines and English law as a unifying force in the emergence of a unified Nigerian legal system. This article argues that this paradox in Elias's work and his struggle against the asserted dualism between English law and African customary law must be situated in the context of the rise of an African legal consciousness or juridical Negritude, home to various political projects of nation-building, African cultural liberation, and development which strategically intersected in their unstable relationship to law and Western culture. This signals a turn to ‘hybridity’ in legal discourse and Elias's professional trajectory seeking to develop a uniform common law for Nigeria as a way to explicate the workings of this relationship, and how African law is inscribed in the interplay of cultural forces constantly (re)negotiating the boundaries of their engagement with one another. This, in turn, reveals a complex picture of mediating between the simultaneous participation of Third World intellectuals in various struggles and personal or ideological projects within African humanism, which an analysis structured around the stability of centres/peripheries conventionally distorts.

This is the third issue of the Periphery Series of the Leiden Journal of International Law. The first two were dedicated to the works of the Chilean jurist Alejandro Álvarez and the Nigerian international lawyer Taslim Olawale Elias – two scholars from regions conventionally cast as ‘peripheral’ to the discipline's metropolitan ‘centre’. This issue takes a somewhat different perspective by focusing on a country (or subcontinent) as a whole. Its primary questions concern the way in which Indian scholars have imagined, shaped, and reshaped international law; the manner in which India's domestic system has received international law; and the ways in which India has been projected by the international legal system.

This article provides a brief overview of legal realism and sketches out its implications for international law, using international environmental law as an example. Although the ‘new’ legal realism is not especially new, its anti-formalist, pragmatic perspective still offers important insights about the international legal process, and serves as a useful counterpoint to a new variety of formalism, which continues to resist the social scientific study of international law. Among its distinctive elements, legal realism views international law instrumentally, is empirical in orientation, and focuses on the processes by which international law is developed, implemented, and enforced, rather than limiting itself to international law doctrine. The fear of critics is that, by de-emphasizing the internal point of view and the concept of legal validity, legal realism deprives international law of the very features that make it a distinctive enterprise.

The institutionalization of international conflict-resolution on a third-party basis, with the creation of a Permanent Court of Arbitration, was one of the high hopes of the political leaders at the First Hague Peace Conference in 1899. In the early phase, from creation of the Court in 1902 until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, 17 cases were initiated before the Court. There was a quite understandable gap, through the War years, until 1921; and then, in the decade until 1931,7 further cases were brought before the Court. This was followed by another awkward hiatus as to cases throughout the 1930s, apparently because of the renewed international tensions in Europe that culminated in World War II. There were no cases before the Court during the War years, the seat of the Court being under belligerent occupation for most of that time. The fact remains, however, that since World War II and, indeed, since 1931, there have been only two cases (both minor ones) brought before the Court, (or three, if we accept the Court Registry's retroactive classification, in its 1990 Annual Report, of the continuing Iran-US Claims Tribunal, which had begun its work in 1981, as one of its own cases).