The International Court of Justice has been exceptionally lucky to have had the services of Carl-August Fleischhauer for a full nine-year term.

It is hard to imagine a candidate with better qualifications. Immediately before coming to the Court Carl-August Fleischhauer had for a period of eleven years been the Legal Counsel of the United Nations. His period of tenure in this highly important but very difficult post was widely admired. He was greatly appreciated by his staff, and in turn gave considerable responsibility to those he especially valued, and was generous in his public acknowledgements of the work of his team. He exemplified the maxim that great leaders not only show the example to be followed, but also take care to express appreciation for work well done. With Fleischhauer, tactical wisdom in this matter fully coincided with his natural instincts as to how he wished to behave towards others. Fleischhauer was at the United Nations through particularly difficult and tumultuous years. His calm and careful advice allowed the United Nations to engage in certain new and imaginative activities, at the same time knowing that the legal basis for this ‘creative lawyering’ was meticulously sound. The morale at the Office of Legal Affairs was high – an equally important matter for a civil servant whether national or international.

NATO's operation in Kosovo provoked diverse legal propositions. The operation was hailed as a humanitarian action stemming from a sense of human solidarity for the victims of the atrocities. On the other hand, it was vilified as a flagrant violation of fundamental principles of international law such as that of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Consequently, legal discourse is moulded by these antithetical ideological forces which epitomise the legal culture of medievalism and modernity. It thus resorts to reformulations and recombinations in order to achieve justifiable results. However, it remains external, lacking a sense of self-consciousness, because it distances the theorizing person from the object of her observation. Therefore, we propose here a discursive model which entails observation, reflection, assessment, and projection where the manifold aspects involved in a situation such as Kosovo are accounted for and new and better solutions are envisioned.

In Germany v. United States (2001), the International Court of Justice ruled that the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations confers judicially enforceable rights on foreign nationals detained for prolonged periods or sentenced to severe penalties without notice of their right to communicate with their consulates. The Court also ruled that states which fail to give timely notice cannot later invoke procedural default to bar individuals from judicial relief. However, the Court did not clearly address other issues, such as requiring individuals to show prejudice to the outcome of the trial, or denial of certain remedies for Convention violations, which may effectively foreclose relief.

The Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD), the intergovernmental body set up to review the implementation of Agenda 21, is in more than one way crucial for the future development of the United Nations system. The Commission is the first organisation within the United Nations system which institutionally links environment and development. In these policy areas, two integration processes can be distinguished. First, environment and development initiatives have to be taken into account in all other areas of policy and law-making, including such important fields as foreign policy and national and international security. Secondly, the interests of actors on the global stage, including states, intergovernmental and non-governmental organisations, are becoming more and more interrelated and convergent.

The idea of randomness is mostly excluded from international legal argumentation. If we need law at all, we are told, it is precisely to avoid arbitrary fortuity. Nonetheless, the exclusion of randomness renders international law structurally incapable of dealing with general risk issues, be they external or manufactured. The core of the problem is the notion of causation. International law seems to be infused by a model of causation that excludes any consideration of randomness. The law of state responsibility and certain elements of international trade law bear witness to this point. Randomness, however, is Janus-faced, and risk is its correlate aspect. By excluding randomness, risk is also left out. Therefore the model of causation embedded in international legal language makes that very language incapable of framing the ideas that a risk society needs to express. It is not surprising, then, that risk societies turn to other languages to express their needs, as is evidenced by the WTO SPS disputes. In this context, international law seems to become a broker of expertise, which refers to the relevant epistemic community that is needed to ‘get the job done’, and abandons any aspiration to holding an independent normative pull in itself.

Traditional conceptions of the international community have come under stress in a time of expanding international public order. Various initiatives purport to observe a reconceived international community from a variety of perspectives: transnational, administrative, pluralist, constitutional, etc. The perspectives on this changing dynamic evidenced by the International Court of Justice, however, have been largely neglected. But as the principal judicial institution tasked with representing the diversity of legal perspectives in the world, the Court represents an important forum by which to understand the changing appreciation of international community. While decisions of the Court have been restrained, an active discourse has been carried forward among individual judges. I look at part of that discourse, organized around one perspective, which I refer to as innate cosmopolitanism, introduced to the forum of the ICJ by the opinions of Judge Álvarez. The innate cosmopolitan perspective reflects an idea of the international community as an autonomous collectivity, enjoying a will, interests, or ends of its own, independent of constituent states. The application of that perspective under international law is put most to test in matters of international security, in particular where the interest in a discrete, global public order runs up against the right to self-defence vested in states. The innate cosmopolitan perspective has not, in these cases, achieved a controlling position – but, over time, it has been part of a dialectical process showing a change in the appreciation of international community before the Court, and a changing perception from the bench of the role of the Court in that community.

As a result of the Iraq-Iran war, Iraq's economy has been exhausted. It had a foreign debt of nearly 80 billion dollars. Iraq apparently failed in its attempts to borrow in foreign capital markets the amounts for investment-in particular for the reparation and expansion of oil production capacity-which it needed to restore its economy. In June 1990, Iraq stated that Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates had undermined the Iraqi economy by persistently producing more than their OPEC quotas. On July 18, 1990, the Iraqi Minister of Foreign Affairs Tariq Aziz stated in the Arab League that Kuwait had stolen Iraqi oil worth 2.4 billion dollars from the Rumaila Oilfield and that Kuwait had built military installations on Iraqi territory. The President of Egypt, Mubarak, then stated that Iraq and Kuwait would negotiate in Jeddah about the Iraqi claim. At the OPEC conference in Geneva on July 26, the minimum reference price was raised to $21.0/b. This despite Iraq's pressure to raise it to $25.0/b. Iraq then warned Kuwait that it had legitimate and historical rights in respect of the Rumaila Oilfield and two islands in the Persian Gulf. On August 1 it turned out that the negotiations in Jeddah had failed. Kuwait stated that it had refused to cede territory. On August 2 Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait. Because of the small capacity of the Kuwaiti army to offer resistance, Kuwait was occupied by Iraq in a very short time.

The article deals with the advantages and disadvantages of an international solution for the safe, permanent disposal or long-term storage of high level radioactive waste from a legal perspective. Firstly, some early attempts to create an International Waste Repository (IWR) and their subsequent fate are examined. Next to this, pros and cons of an IWR in the context of recent national and international developments in the management of, and trade in radioactive waste, are considered. Main related question is, whether an international solution to waste disposal is a useful option. Finally, the legal and institutional problems which must be considered if states decide to create an international facility for waste disposal are described. Special attention is given to a model provided for in Chapter V of the Euratom Treaty of 1957.

In this article, special attention will be given to the recent judgment of the European Court of Human Right in the case of Akdivar and Others v. Turkey. Since 1985, a violent conflict has raged in the South-Eastern region of Turkey, between the Turkish security forces and sections of the Kurdish population in favour of Kurdish autonomy, in particular members of the PKK (Workers' Party of Kurdistan). Since 1987, 10 of the 11 provinces of South-Eastern Turkey have been subjected to emergency rule, which was in force at the time of the facts complained of. The main issue in this case concerned the fact that during this conflict, a large number of villages have been destroyed and evacuated by the security forces. According to the applicants, the alleged burning of their houses by the security forces constituted, inter alia, a violation of Article 3 (the prohibition of torture and inhuman treatment or punishment) and Article 8 (the right of respect for private life, family life, and home) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and Article 1 of Protocol No. 1 (property rights).

Matthias and I clearly agree on a great deal: a voluntarist approach to defining public international law is unsatisfactory; any rule of recognition in international law must provide a basis for a link between legality and legitimacy; one of the central contributions that law can make to international society is procedural in nature. However, our respective positions on the utility of a binary distinction between law and not-law have significant impacts on our approaches. We are both concerned, I think, with preserving the autonomy of politics – with ensuring that politics (or, more specifically, international public authority) do not come to be invaded by law. My own concern with preserving the autonomy of law leads me to two conclusions with which Matthias would take issue: that international public authority must be constituted by law; and that the rules which those authorities administer must be treated differently, depending on whether or not they meet a set of formal criteria that legal rules must satisfy. I will also address Matthias's discussion of Lon L. Fuller's internal morality of law and Benedict Kingsbury's concept of publicness in international law. I believe that both sets of concepts may be useful to Matthias's argument and deserve further attention. First, however, I would like to explore what it means, or could mean, to cut off the head of the king.

On June 2, 1988, the Convention on the Regulation of Antarctic Mineral Activities was concluded after several years of negotiations. Starting with a review of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the author discusses the new Convention and the organs it has created. Special attention is paid to the possible impact of mineral activities to the unique environment of Antarctica, and the safeguards which are offered by the Convention in this respect. According to the author, it can be doubted whether the regime's institutions will adequately account for the environmental consequences of mineral activities.

This article discusses whether it is permissible to cumulatively convict a superior under both Articles 7(1) and 7(3) of the ICTY Statute. After introducing the various modes of command responsibility under each provision, the discussion is premised on the double jeopardy/non bis in idem concerns underlying the case law of the Tribunal, and that of the ICTR, in relation to cumulative convictions for substantive offences. The article first presents arguments supporting the proposition that superiors should not be held cumulatively responsible under the aforementioned provisions. It then presents arguments to the contrary, including considerations in relation to the impact on sentencing. In this light, the article critically appraises the case law of both Tribunals.

In early 2005 a Consultative Board presented a report (the Sutherland Report) on the functioning of the WTO and means to improve its efficiency. The author summarizes the Board's key findings and reflects on its main recommendations. The Board discusses sovereignty and globalization in the context of the world trading system. In addition it finds that the WTO needs to reconsider its institutional framework and some concepts underlying the organization. The Board particularly urges the WTO to address the erosion of the most-favoured-nation treatment through the proliferation of the preferential trade agreements. Transparency and civil society, dispute settlement, decision-making, efficiency, and the role of the Director-General and the secretariat are also discussed. The author concludes that the Board focuses on economic consequences of trade liberalization but fails to address the harmful effects of globalization. He agrees with the Board that institutional reform is required, but concludes that it would have been helpful if the Board had offered clearer direction on how to improve the decision-making process.

Taking the United Nations, its specialized agencies and the EC as a focal point, this article looks at the fiscal position of international organizations and their officials vis-à-vis their host state. Firstly, the fiscal privileges are examined from a theoretical point of view, after which a number of cases are analyzed in which international organizations and their host state differed in their views on the application of the aforementioned privileges.

From a broader perspective, this study explores the watercourse of standards which have sprung on the international level down to their application in daily life. A particular type of provision -concerning the fiscal immunities of an international organization and its officialscontained in a particular type of multilateral convention, dealing with the status, privileges and immunities of international organizations and their officials, is followed down to its application on the national level.

The recent moderate trend to increasingly apply human rights law in investment awards is accompanied by certain new investment treaties which include expressed human rights provisions. An analysis of recent investment awards indicates that though there are some ‘winds of change’ in this field, it is equally noticeable that human rights law is far from being mainstreamed in international investment law. Investment arbitration procedural law is also undergoing a process of change, and the new procedural rules tend to enhance public elements in the investment arbitral system. This study is aimed at explaining these recent legal changes, highlighting the role of social movements in reframing investment relations as well as increasing public pressure to apply human rights law. These framing changes concern broadening the frame of investment arbitration (beyond the foreign investor–host state dyad), reversing the perceived balance of power between investors and host states, and zooming-in on local individuals and communities residing in host states. The discussion on factors impeding legal change in this field emphasizes the role of the private legal culture prevalent in the investment arbitration system, which is reflected and reinforced by certain resilient socio-legal frames. Informed by this analysis, the study suggests some legal mechanisms which can mitigate the inter-partes frame, and increase the application of human rights law in investment arbitration; inter alia, rigorous transparency rules that are likely to facilitate increased public pressure on tribunals and increase the participation of social movements representing local actors in arbitral processes.

Taking the opportunity of this LJIL special lecture, Professor Alter provides an interdisciplinary retrospective that explains, defends and critiques six common visions of international law: The naïve political scientist’s expectations about international law as a fixed reflection of political choices; the legal formalist and structural theorist who believes that formal rules, institutions, and processes should generate similar outcomes in different parts of the world; the Western centric scholar’s notion that one can draw general lessons based on European and American experiences; the liberal internationalist who believes that multilateral processes generate consent based agreements and outcomes; the law and society scholar whose focus on the local can minimize international structural elements; and the international legal sociologist who believes that meanings and practices constitute international law. After reflecting on what each vision captures and misses about international law, Professor Alter identifies the policy stakes of residing within a vision. While we need to draw from multiple visions to understand the hybridity of international law, we also need to understand the implicit presumptions of each vision, as these presumptions generate contradictory prescriptive recommendations.

This paper is concerned with the denunciation of declarations of acceptance of the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice under the Optional Clause and the impact that the 1984 Judgment of the Court in the jurisdictional phase of the Nicaragua case may have had upon it. In this decision the Court found that the principle of good faith is of paramount importance in the legal regime of the Optional Clause and introduced in that regime the element of a ‘reasonable time’ for the denunciation of declarations of indefinite duration and silent as to termination. The relevant passage of the Judgment is discussed with a view to determine the contours of this requirement and the ways it may operate in practice.