The environmental and economic realities of Arctic climate change present novel problems for international law. Arctic warming and pollution raise important questions about responsibilities and accountabilities across borders, as they result from anthropogenic activities both within and outside the Arctic region, from the Global North and the Global South. Environmental interdependencies and economic development prospects connect in a nexus of risk and opportunity that raises difficult normative questions pertaining to Arctic governance and sovereignty. This article looks at how the Arctic has been produced in international legal spaces. It addresses the implication of states and Indigenous peoples in processes of Arctic governance. Looking at specific international legal instruments relevant to Arctic climate change and development, the author attempts to tease out the relationship between the concepts of Indigenous rights and state sovereignty that underlie these international legal realms. What do these international legal regimes tell us with respect to the role of Arctic Indigenous peoples and the role of states in governing the ‘global’ Arctic? It is argued that while international law has come a long way in recognizing the special status of Indigenous peoples in the international system, it still hesitates to recognize Indigenous groups as international law makers. Comparing the status of Indigenous peoples under specific international regimes to their role within the Arctic Council, it becomes evident that more participatory forms of global governance are entirely possible and long overdue.

This article discusses some of the legal issues that arise in the context of the possible establishment of an individual complaints procedure for violations of international humanitarian law, a proposal launched at the Hague Appeal for Peace in 1999. It examines such a proposal in the light of recent practice of human rights bodies, which suggests that the latter are not the most adequate means to improve supervision of compliance with international humanitarian law. The article argues that a separate body should be established and concentrates on the competence ratione materiae of such a body, the conceptualisation of the legal basis for individual complaints, non-state actors as respondents of complaints and applicable reparations for violations of international humanitarian law.

In March 1997, the Security Council adopted Resolution 1101 (1997) which authorised a multinational protection force – known as Operation Alba – to enter Albania “to facilitate the safe and prompt delivery of humanitarian assistance, and to help create a secure environment for the missions of international organisations in Albania, including those providing humanitarian assistance.” Created with the consent of the government of Albania, the intervention occurred as a direct but also as a near-immediate response to the political, financial and humanitarian crisis that had been precipitated by the collapse of so-called pyramid schemes in Albania. The purpose of this article is to examine the background of the adoption of Resolution 1101 (1997) and then to investigate the impact and importance of the consent for the operation given by the beleaguered government of President Sali Berisha. The article will then analyse the legal significance, meaning and interpretation of Security Council in Resolution 1101 (1997), as amended in Resolution 1114 of June 1997, in its endeavour to provide an account of the organisation, achievements, shortcomings and lessons of Operation Alba.

This editorial takes a practical approach. It aims to stimulate reflections on the way we teach international law today, on how new technologies could enhance the pedagogical experience, on the upgrading of the role and participation of students, and on a better connection with the ‘real world’. It focuses on ‘how’ rather than on ‘what’ or ‘for what purpose’ we teach international law. With this aim in mind, it serves a few ideas seasoned with suggestions and examples.

This article focuses on two key aspects of the Keraterm case before the ICTY. The first is Duško Sikirica's acquittal of the crime of genocide. The Trial Chamber's construction of the phrase “destruction in part of a group” is critically examined and compared to the reasoning of a differently constituted Trial Chamber in the Krstić case. The second key aspect of the Keraterm case is the decision by all three defendants to enter into plea agreements with the Prosecutor at a relatively late stage in the trial. This article discusses the rules governing plea agreements, general sentencing factors and the extent to which guilty pleas have resulted in a pattern of lighter sentences in the jurisprudence of the Tribunals.

On 27 February 1998, the International Court of Justice rejected the preliminary objections of the US and of the UK in the cases concerning Questions of Interpretation and Application of the 1971 Montreal Convention Arising From the Aerial Incident at Lockerbie. The arguments made to the Court, and its decisions on jurisdiction and admissibility, are examined with a view to ascertaining the issues facing the Court, as well as the possible outcomes, if the cases reach the merits stage. The disputes over the Montreal Convention are considered, but particular attention is paid to the legal effects and, more widely, the legality of the relevant Security Council resolutions (Resolutions 748 and 883). The underlying question to be considered is whether there are any indications in the judgments that the Court is moving towards review of those resolutions.

Both state-centrism and Eurocentrism are under challenge in international law today. This article argues that this double challenge is mirrored back into the study of the history of international law. It examines the effects of the rise of positivism as a method of norm-identification and the role of methodological nationalism upon the study of the history of international law in the modern foundational period of international law. It extends this by examining how this bequeathed a double exclusionary bias regarding time and space to the study of the history of international law as well as a reiterative focus on a series of canonical events and authors to the exclusion of others such as those related to the Islamic history of international law. It then analyses why this state of historiographical affairs is changing, highlighting intra-disciplinary developments within the field of the history of international law and the effects that the ‘international turn in the writing of history’ is having on the writing of a new history of international law for a global age. It concludes with a reflection on some of the tasks ahead, providing a series of historiographical signposts for the history of international law as a field of new research.

The Treaty of Asunción in 1991 gave rise to the Common Market of the Southern Cone (MERCOSUR) as a promising economic integration process. Over the past 20 years, as the legal personality of MERCOSUR was reinforced, there were also important changes in its legal system. International law and international economic law played a fundamental role in the development of MERCOSUR law. The main aim of this article is to provide some insights into the current stage of MERCOSUR law, taking into account the evolution of the legal system, the dispute settlement mechanism, and the relationship with international law. In order to do so, the author examines various turning points in the case law of the arbitration tribunals constituted so far and the Permanent Review Tribunal established by the Olivos Protocol.

According to classical legal positivism, the prerequisite to being selected as a judge on the International Court of Justice is legal expertise and high moral character–the personality of the judge is therefore merely the subject of idle curiosity. American Legal Realists understood that one could not explain past decisions or predict future decisions merely by extrapolating rules; account needed to be taken of history, culture, politics, economics, and the personality of the judge. As a person, Judge Oda is famous for his self-control in personal comportment. As a judge he is a study in independence, having produced an unmatched number of dissents and separate opinions. His contribution to international law will continue to influence us.

At the outset of the conflict over Kosovo, the use of armed force by NATO member states has been justified to force the Government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to accept and sign the Rambouillet agreement. Later on, the use of force was justified in order to prevent a major humanitarian catastrophe. But examination of the relevant Security Council resolutions and of the circumstances surrounding the Rambouillet negotiations shed a totally different light on the legal arguments advanced by proponents of NATO's intervention. Modern international law on the use of force by states, as enshrined in the UN Charter, is still at the core of inter-state relations.

In this article, I apply René Girard's theory of generative violence to the international law relating to the use of force. I argue that texts of international law make gestures of referral towards an immanent normativity on the fettering of divine violence. The means to this end is a form of sacrificial violence that seeks to promote the preservation and cohesion of the ‘international community’. The structuring of this violence through international law and its repeated staging reproduces the relationship of prophecy to miracle. Empirically, I draw mainly on excerpts from the 2006 US National Security Strategy.

In light of serious problems with the assignment of counsel to defendants before the ICTR, this article examines the freedom of choice of assigned defence counsel before both ad hoc International Criminal Tribunals. International legal instruments guarantee free legal assistance for indigent defendants but do not recognize an unrestricted free choice of such counsel. International case law, however, recognizes that an effective defence can hardly arise from a client-counsel relation that is not based on trust and confidence. Trust and confidence are therefore decisive for a proper understanding of the right to have free legal assistance. Unlike the practice of the ICTY of recognizing the importance of these factors, the Registrar of the ICTR seems to give more weight to geographical distribution of lawyers and other discriminating factors. The Appeals Chamber of the ICTR dealt with this policy in the Akayesu case and overturned the decision of the Registry to refuse the counsel of the defendant's own choosing.

In 2001, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) seminally found self-amnesty laws on serious human rights violations to be null and void. However, later national reactions showed that this supranational control has faced challenges. Such supranational judicial authority has been exercised where amnesty laws and other exemption measures blocked judicial cases, democratic referendums upheld legislation, and peace-making processes existed.

This article seeks to determine whether the traditionally interventionist jurisprudence of the IACtHR on amnesty laws/exemption measures has been legitimate under global constitutionalism standards. The standards considered are: human rights, namely, rights of victims of mass atrocities; consistency or coherence of this jurisprudence with international, regional and national practices; and democratic legitimacy and/or accountability considerations.

Victim rights have underlain the IACtHR’s jurisprudence on amnesty laws and similar measures. Importantly, developments on victim rights are not exclusive to the IACtHR as case law of other supranational human rights bodies evidences. Among human rights courts and bodies, the IACtHR has exercised the highest level of control over amnesty laws/exemption measures, even nullifying national legislation. However, the IACtHR’s case law shares common principles with UN/regional jurisprudential developments and domestic practices in terms of inadmissibility of amnesties and other exemption measures in cases of serious abuses. Unlike the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the IACtHR has not deferred to sovereign state appreciation (conventionality control doctrine). Nevertheless, the IACtHR has arguably begun to move towards more ‘moderated’ approaches. This is advisable under democratic legitimacy considerations.

Article 27 ICC Statute has proven to cause compatibility problems with regard to immunity provisions in national constitutions. States have, however, indicated readiness to overcome these problems. On the other hand, Article 98 forms the pivot of the latest attempt of the United States, a non-signatory state, to ensure a de facto immunity from ICC jurisdiction for US nationals. This editorial sets out the contrasting approach of states to the ICC and concludes that the US Proposal for a Rule to 98(2) would have had the effect that the rule encompassed in Article 27 ICC Statute would in practice not apply to nationals of non-state parties.

The aim of this article is to show that the concept of perpetration by means as it appears in Article 25 of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (Rome Statute) accurately reflects liability for crimes committed by high-level perpetrators who exercise control over the actions of the lower-level (fully responsible) perpetrators. Finding the proper mode of liability in these cases is crucial to the International Criminal Court's (ICC) mission of ending impunity for serious international crimes. While international criminal law may be unlikely to deter criminals, especially heads of state and other powerful leaders, it can provide some sense of justice for the victims by convicting and punishing those responsible for their suffering. As such, the functions of international criminal law are to a large extent expressive and retributive. At the same time, it is important to keep the focus of international criminal law on individual responsibility of the perpetrators. It is, therefore, crucial to find proper labels that reflect culpability well. I hope to make a contribution to this search in what follows.

This article is divided into five sections. First, I provide a background to the move, recently articulated by the ICC, from the concept of joint criminal enterprise (JCE) to that of indirect perpetration (and indirect co-perpetration) (section 2). Second, I analyse the original presentation of this idea by the German jurist Claus Roxin (section 3). Third, I examine the application of this concept by the German courts, particularly in the 1994 trial of three high level GDR officials held liable as indirect perpetrators for the killings (carried out by the border guards) of refugees at the East/West German border (section 4). Then I present a recent (Winter 2011) proposal by Jens Ohlin to abandon both JCE and indirect perpetration in favour of another mode of collective liability based on joint intentions (section 5). Finally, I defend the concept of indirect perpetration against Ohlin's criticisms, arguing that it offers a more accurate way to label the conduct of high-level perpetrators who carry out crimes by means of direct perpetrators who are themselves liable (section 6).

The Universal Periodic Review (UPR) of the United Nations Human Rights Council is an innovative monitoring mechanism in the international human rights law system. As the UPR matures, scholars have increasingly sought to stand back and understand it as a process. In this article, I take work in this vein further by considering more closely the actors involved in the UPR – humans and objects – and highlighting the time creating effects that emerge from the relationships between them. Across the various stages of the UPR, a range of temporalities – from cyclicality and linearity to retrogression and suspension of time – are produced and sustained by people, reports, data, lists, microphones, screens, computers, action plans, and desks, just to name a few. I argue from this that time is materially made in the review process, often in micro and taken for granted ways. In its operation, the UPR appears as a collection of temporal assemblages. Or, in language drawn from actor-network theory (ANT), an assortment of fluid and interweaving sets of actants networked together who generate ideas of time across its practice. Apprehending time creation in this material, the ANT-inflected way is highly significant for scholars and practitioners interested in the UPR. It holds potential to influence how this process can be understood, approached, and located within international human rights law as itself a larger, time creating actor-network.

This article examines the problem of colliding international regimes by reference to the International Criminal Court (ICC) and the UN Security Council. Given the different logics or rationalities of these institutions – the Security Council is first and foremost a (power) political organ, while the ICC is in charge of legal assessments – the collision potential is high. A collision rule was therefore introduced into the Rome Statute in the form of Article 16; however, all instances of its application so far have been highly controversial. While norm application is always controversial to some extent, we argue – in reference to Thomas Franck's work on the legitimacy of international norms – that regime responsiveness, secondary rules or a neutral application control of Article 16 could contribute to successful collision management.

At the time the United States withdrew from participation in the Nicaragua case at the International Court of Justice, the US government expressed concern that ‘the course on which the Court may now be embarked could do enormous harm to it as an institution and to the cause of international law’. This essay examines whether or to what extent the anticipated negative effects came to pass. It concludes that dire predictions of harm to the Court were overstated. Twenty-five years later, the rate at which states accept the Court's jurisdiction has held steady. Only a few states have added jurisdictional reservations concerning military activities. The mix of cases being brought to the Court has shifted towards a more representative distribution. States are generally complying with the Court's decisions, though some compliance problems remain. The most serious negative impact has been on the willingness of the United States (still the Court's most active litigant) to participate fully in international dispute settlement.

Since Oscar Schachter’s articulation of the concept, scholars have attempted to better understand the ‘invisible college of international lawyers’ making up our profession. They have done this through piecemeal surveys of public professional rosters (arbitrators, International Court of Justice counsel), piecing together anecdotes of connections between members, or constructing stories about individuals’ role in discrete legal developments. Departing from these approaches, we use the obituaries published in the British Yearbook of International Law (1920–2017) to draw an interactive map of the ‘invisible college’. Obituaries are a unique window into international law’s otherwise private inner life, unveiling professional and personal connections between international lawyers and their shared career paths beyond single institutions or individual stories. Employing network analysis, a method commonly used in social sciences to describe complex social phenomena such as this, we are able to demonstrate the ubiquity of informal networks whereby ideas move, and provide evidence of the community’s homogeneity. Exploring connections between international lawyers and their shared characteristics in this novel way, we shed light on the features of this group and the potential impact individual personalities have on the law. These characteristics of the profession and its members are evident to insiders but externally invisible. Graphic representation is a powerful tool in bolstering critiques for diversity and contestation of mainstream law-making narratives. Rather than exhaustively mapping, however, we propose to take the ‘dead white men’ trope to an extreme, provoking the reader to question the self-image of the profession as an impersonal expert science.