The article explores the demise of the ‘colonial war’ category through the employment of French colonial troops, under the 1918 armistice, to occupy the German Rhineland.

It traces the prevalence of – and the anxieties underpinning – antebellum doctrine on using ‘Barbarous Forces’ in ‘European’ war. It then records the silence of postbellum scholars on the ‘horror on the Rhine’ – orchestrated allegations of rape framed in racialized terms of humanity and the requirements of the law of civilized warfare. Among possible explanations for this silence, the article follows recent literature that considers this scandal as the embodiment of crises in masculinity, white domination, and European civilization.

These crises, like the scandal itself, expressed antebellum jurisprudential anxieties about the capacity – and implications – of black soldiers being ‘drilled white’. They also deprived postbellum lawyers of the vocabulary necessary to address what they signified: breakdown of the laws of war; evident, self-inflicted European barbarity; and the collapse of international law itself, embodied by the Versailles Diktat treating Germany – as Smuts warned, ‘as we would not treat a kaffir nation’ – as a colonial ‘object’, as Schmitt lamented.

Last, the article traces the resurgence of ‘colonial war’. It reveals how, at the moment of collapse, in the very instrument embodying it, the category found a new life. Article 22(5) of the League of Nations Covenant (the Covenant) reasserted control over the colonial object, furnishing international lawyers with a new vocabulary to address the employment of colonial troops – yet, now, as part of the ‘law of peace’. Reclassified, both rule and category re-emerged, were codified, and institutionalized imperial governance.

Negotiators of the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC) did not intend the Pre-Trial Chamber (PTC) to act as a de facto investigating judge; rather, their intent was that the PTC ensure that the Prosecutor act responsibly and within well-defined limits. Several opportunities have arisen in the Lubanga case before the ICC's PTC and the Appeals Chamber to examine the Prosecutor's duty and performance in disclosing documentary evidence and the identities of witnesses at the pre-trial stage. International criminal tribunals necessarily must bridge the evidentiary magnitude of atrocity crimes with a pragmatic focus on one person's role. The PTC judge should aggressively narrow the charges and focus the Prosecutor on the requirement of minimal evidence to meet the sufficiency standard for the remaining charges, direct the Prosecutor to share existing and emerging evidence with the accused in a timely manner and not wait until 30 days prior to confirmation hearing, and use statutory power to ensure timely non-disclosure requests and determinations.

The defendant in international trials is presumed innocent until proven guilty but is often judged by the ‘court of popular opinion’ even before the trial begins. This article provides reflections on how the image of a malevolent individual emerges with regard to those brought/to be brought before international courts. In such a situation, coming before the Court and subsequently being convicted or acquitted can mean little. It is coming before the Court that is, in itself, the end of the line. The manner in which the International Criminal Court has functioned has contributed, both advertently and inadvertently, to the maintenance of the image of the defendant as a malevolent being. Specifically, the purposes of historiography and the ever present discourse of deterrence, breed the suspicion that this ‘demonizing the defendant’ effect might be endorsed by the manner in which the Prosecutor has popularized the Court and it's functions and aims. This is a conflict that gets to the heart of international criminal law. It is the dilemma of how one must simultaneously fulfil two of the law's essential aims: to presume innocence (and thus abide by a fundamental tenet of international criminal law) and to deter, educate and pacify (and thus for the law to have a reason to exist).

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.

Teck v. Pakootas revisits the infamous Trail smelter, which made history in public international law. This more recent case should be set to make history as well, due to the manner in which the issue of extraterritorial exercise of jurisdiction was handled. The substantive result reached in the courts seems fair, reasonable, and appropriate: a notorious polluter, Teck Cominco Metals Inc., is called to account by the United States Environmental Protection Agency and required to study the feasibility of cleaning up a site it contaminated by dumping effluents in a transboundary river over the course of several decades. Yet, both courts that examined this case on the merits failed to understand the ramifications of this extension of the Environmental Protection Agency's jurisdiction across the Canada–United States border. This article begins with a doctrinal analysis of jurisdictional rules in private and public international law, and then proceeds to evaluate those rules with the help of insights from scholarship on global administrative law and international public authority.

The 1993/1999 Belgian Law on Universal Jurisdiction allows for prosecution before Belgian domestic courts regardless of the nationality of perpetrators or victims, the place where the breaches were committed, or the presence on Belgian territory of the alleged perpetrators. Is universal jurisdiction contrary to international law? Is universal jurisdiction in absentia permitted under Belgian law and under international law? What is the relationship between universal jurisdiction, as exercised by a national court, and the Statute of the International Criminal Court? This article provides an overview of the Belgian legislation and its future with regard to international law and the Statute of the International Criminal Court.

The United Nations Claims Commission (UNCC) was set up by the UN Security Council to process claims submitted by victims of the war between Iraq and the Coalition Forces (1990–1991). From an institutional point of view, the UNCC is a curious creation, assuming the form of a hybrid between an administrative claims procedure and an international tribunal. This article will highlight some of the difficulties with the institutional model chosen and focus on the institutional, as well as the normative legitimacy of the UNCC, whereby particular attention is devoted to Iraq's participation in the procedure.

In this article the author elaborates upon the close relationship between the concepts of human rights and development, examined in relation to African legal practice. Development is considered as a comprehensive legal, economic, social, and cultural concept. According to the author the right to development may be claimed by individuals and peoples of developing nations. In this respect the African situation is carefully analyzed by the author. The African Charter for Human and Peoples Rights, which came into force in October, 1986, may be considered a first regional effort to promote human rights and development. So far, the Charter has already been ratified by 30 African States.

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), created in 1930 to handle German reparations from the First World War, has enjoyed a unique international legal position. This status was questioned when the Bank, in 2001, recalled its shares held by private parties. The resulting arbitral award settled the BIS's sui generis legal status, as well as making some important rulings about the application of state responsibility rules to international institutions in cases of expropriation. Additionally, the award provided needed insight as to the use of various methods of valuation of corporate assets in shareholder claims.

How do we and how should we punish perpetrators of international crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide? Is it fair to hold individuals responsible for their role in manifestations of this type of collective violence? Do the punishments issued by international criminal institutions support the usual penological rationales? Do they actually attain their goals? Is the Westernized international criminal justice system the most appropriate means of dealing with mass violence, especially in non-Western countries which might have a different perception of justice? What are the alternatives? These are just some of the questions which Mark Drumbl addresses in this book.

Written from an outsider's perspective, this paper tries to capture the ethos, or, if you prefer, the Sittlichkeit, of international criminal law. It argues that international criminal law can profitably be seen as an ethos, rather than a body of law. In this telling, international criminal law, despite its name, emerges as an ethical–administrative enterprise rather than a legal one. If placed alongside global administrative law, for instance, international criminal law appears as alegal rather than illegal, so that to criticize international criminal law for violating, say, the ‘principle of legality’ would be like faulting apples for not producing orange juice, and oranges for not making apple pie.

In January 1996, tension escalated in the south-eastern Aegean as a result of Turkey's challenge of Greek sovereignty over the Imia rocks. Turkish ‘journalists’ from the newspaper Hurriyet occupied the Greek rocks and took down the Greek flag. This led to a build-up of Turkish and Greek naval forces near the rocks, thus creating a potential source of armed conflict. The tension was reduced after diplomatic intervention by the United States. However, there was a surprising absence of initiative on the part of the European Union in spite of the fact that the external borders of one of its member states had been challenged. The following will be a very brief account of the incident and the arguments of both parties, as evidenced primarily by their respective verbal notes.

It is now standard in contemporary international law commentary to note that the latter part of the twentieth century has seen a move away from the traditional understanding of international law as fundamentally based on the consent of states. As just two examples, customary international law has in some contexts become more influential than treaties and human rights obligations are now recognized as often binding states even when they have signed no treaty acknowledging their existence. Treaty interpretation, by contrast, has remained focused upon the parties to a treaty, with even textualist approaches to treaty interpretation justified as the best means of ascertaining the intent of the contracting states. The purpose of the present article is to highlight the existence of a subset of treaties for which even a teleological approach to interpretation fails to capture the central importance for the treaty of entities other than the contracting states. These ‘power-conferring treaties’ do not merely entrust tribunals with the power to effectively fashion the means by which a treaty's goals should be achieved. To varying degrees, they grant control of the treaty itself, including, at times, both its enforcement and the very meaning of its terms, to entities other than the contracting states. As a result, the traditional emphasis in treaty interpretation on the ‘object and purpose’ of the treaty, and the precise language in which the treaty is written, will fail to generate an interpretation that faithfully captures the manner in which the treaty genuinely functions. The article then illustrates the potential impact of the power-conferring nature of a treaty through an analysis of the meaning of the term ‘investment’ in the International Convention for Settlement of Investment Disputes. This is one of the most controversial topics in contemporary international investment law, with an enormous impact upon the jurisdiction of ICSID arbitral tribunals. It is argued that recognizing the power-conferring nature of the ICSID Convention provides an enhanced understanding of the way in which this term should be interpreted.

A locus classicus of international law, the study of the regulation of the legality of the use of force has an unavoidable ring of tragic fanciness about it. War, as acknowledged by David Kennedy in the very first sentence of his book, is indeed ‘a profound topic – like truth, love, death or the divine’. A Pandora's box of multiple distilled intellectual emotions behind which lurk the horrid memories of its survivors, war only truly breathes in the mirrors of the mutilated, in the eyes of the tortured, in the memories of the displaced, in withering flowers over graves crowned, most of the time, by religious symbols. A vague intellectual scent of it, a sort of aseptic intellectual variant, still remains, nonetheless, a field of professional interest for international lawyers.

The present article describes the institutional structure and dispute settlement system within the Common Market of the South. It analyses the first arbitral award given by the first ad hoc tribunal established within the Common Market of the South and discusses the award's implications for the Common Market's law and institutions.

International Space Law forms one of the most recently established branches of international law. Its progressive development requires effective means to settle disputes at an international level. A generally accepted system to settle disputes on space law matters peacefully would not only benefit the world community by reducing tension in international relations, but would also appear to be indispensible for an increase in the reliability and credibility of this new field of international law.Moreover, enhanced trust in the existing system of international regulation of space activities could facilitate the willingness of nations to extend and elaborate this specific field of international law. Establishment of an effective mechanism for dispute settlement in international space law could positively influence the general subject matter of peaceful settlement of international disputes by setting an example for international relations in the increasingly dependant world of modern times.

In the South China Sea Arbitration initiated by the Philippines against China, the Chinese (Taiwan) Society of International Law (CSIL) submitted an amicus curiae brief to the Annex VII arbitral tribunal established in accordance with United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). This article first analyzes the definition and legal nature of amicus curiae status, then introduces cases involving amicus curiae in the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and UNCLOS dispute settlement mechanisms. By analyzing relevant statutes and rules of procedure, this article assesses the acceptance of amicus curiae submissions by international courts or tribunals, in different dispute settlement mechanisms. Finally, the article describes the significance of the amicus curiae brief submitted by CSIL to the arbitral tribunal, concluding that the South China Sea Arbitral Tribunal did take the amicus curiae submission into account, but exercised caution in its consideration.

Justus Lipsius (1547–1606) was among the most famed intellectuals in his time, but was largely forgotten during the Enlightenment. Intellectually, he stood at an important crossroads, his thought incorporating both late Renaissance traits and precursors of the early modern age. In this article I give a brief intellectual background to Lipsius's thought before concentrating on his thought regarding the lawful interaction between polities, with a focus on lawful government, dissimulation, war, and empire. I then detail the way in which Lipsian thought critically informed later theory and practice. It contained an eclectic mix of divine law, natural law, and positive human law, with some elements borrowed and popularized from earlier writers and others being more original. In the end, his work stands out both as an important inspiration for later theorists and practitioners, and as an example of the many idiosyncrasies and possible trajectories that early international law could have adopted.

Identifying the range of lawful reactions to non-performance of treaties is still problematic, as shown by the case concerning the Application of the Interim Accord of 13 September 1995 (FYROM/Greece). After reviewing the current understanding of the relationship between the law of treaties and the law of international responsibility, the author analyses the legal regime pertaining to suspension and termination of treaties on grounds of breach, on the one hand, and, on the other, to countermeasures, arguing that the exceptio inadimpleti contractus may still play an independent, albeit limited, role as a reaction to lawful non-performance of international treaties.

On 30 December 1994 in Geneva, the four major players in world trade -the United States, the European Union, Japan, andCanada - accepted the Agreement Establishing the World Trade Organization (WTO Agreement).The entry into force of the Agreement on 1 January 1995 brings both expanded and improved trade rules and greatly improved enforcement. We have entered a new era in international dispute settlement. This brief article discusses the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes in Annex 2 of the WTO Agreement, the negotiating process that led to it, and the implementation of the Understanding in the United States.