After an extensive discussion of the treatment of cultural property through the ages, the author focuses on the position of art treasures under current international law. Are states under an obligation to return cultural property to its country of origin? In order to answer this question, the author introduces a ‘gliding scale’, based on the circumstances of the removal of the works of art.

This contribution deals with legal protection against violations of the European Convention on Human Rights at both the national as well as the international level. The conclusion is that the practice of the European Court of Human Rights is inadequate and that the protection in the Netherlands could be better. Several recommendations are made in order to improve the co-operation between Strasbourg and domestic institutions in the field of the protection of human rights.

Progress in International Law, edited by Russ Miller and Rebecca Bratspies, is one of the most notable compiled volumes in the field of general international law for 2008. It merits the reader's attention for several reasons. First, it deals with a central mantra of internationalism, namely the Kantian idea that international law can be a catalyst for social progress on a global level. While progress is regularly used in international law writings as a slogan to accentuate diverse claims of renewalism, it is a notion that has received as such little attention in scholarship. In this sense, the book at hand responds to an important gap in the literature. Second, the editors have clearly devoted a lot of attention in the planning and production of the book to ensuring that the essays are meaningfully juxtaposed, complementary, and in dialogue with one another. Although this is an essential quality for any compiled volume, it is easier said than done, and this book has done reasonably well. The final product boasts some forty contributors and more than 900 pages of text, packed together in an attractive (but steeply priced) hardback edition by Martinus Nijhoff (Brill). Third, the book aspires to ‘survey the state of the contemporary legal order’ (p. 11). This is a broad and unusually ambitious scholarly project aimed at ‘cataloguing this generation's tangled international legal order’ and hoping ‘to map the current tendencies, theories, doctrine, and trends’ (p. 11). This last promise alone would have been sufficient to trigger anyone's interest in the book at the beginning of (what is perceived to be) a new era of internationalism.

One year ago in this Journal Carty offered a reassessment of Schmitt's writings on international law, in an attempt to present them as a still valuable theoretical tool in a contemporary critical discourse on (neo)liberalism. Carty's proceedings, thought provoking as they may be, is unconvincing, because Schmitt's views on international law are indissolubly tied up with Nazi ideology and political purposes. Paradoxically a transfer in our time of Schmitt's Großraum concept provides a less critical argument against neoliberalism than at the best a dubious bolster to it.

The law of international organisations needs to address comprehensively, the legal question of the accountability of such Organisations. In the contemporary world, whereas states, multinational corporations, and individuals can be held accountable under applicable systems of law, there is no equivalent set of rules that applies to international organisations. The OPCW, a global disarmament Organisation, is a good model of an accountable Organisation. The Chemical Weapons Convention embodies various sets of rules and provisions, which ensure the accountable functioning of the Organisation. This article examines the concept of the accountability of international organisations as envisioned by the International Law Association, and analyses the concept in the context of the OPCW.

In a world of sovereign states, gathering evidence is one of the major challenges for the new international criminal tribunals. The decision in Prosecutor v. Blaškić, by the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, shows some of the difficulties. The Tribunal finds it has the power to issue compulsory orders to sovereign states for the production of evidence, although not to issue a subpoena as such. The Tribunal also assumes the power to review a state's national security privilege, a holding that may challenge the more protective provisions of the new Rome treaty for a permanent International Criminal Court. However, the Appeals Chamber's declaration that there is no power to summon particular government officials, even for eyewitness testimony, that document production must be limited, and that its orders cannot be directly enforced, may hobble the Tribunal's capacity to muster the necessary proof at trial.

The article introduces innovative means by which states can express their consent to be bound by treaties. Such innovative means have been incorporated in some multilateral environmental agreements that were concluded in December 1999 and January 2000. It is discussed whether limits of law-making have been transgressed by the use of these innovative means as the law of treaties allegedly presupposes that states actually give their consent to new treaty obligations, take some active step to express their consent to such obligations and do so at a time that the obligations were in existence and were known to them.

This article provides an overview of, and a short comment on the WTO's Rules of Conduct for the Understanding on Rules and Procedures Governing the Settlement of Disputes. After an introduction, the nine articles and three annexes of the Rules are described. Next, some comments are made. The article concludes arguing that some clarifications to the Rules could be made. However, these are not expected to be realised shortly, since there is as yet little or no experience with the Rules. Interpretative issues regarding the Rules appear unlikely to be invoked frequently for fear of impairing the success of the dispute settlement process.

International law scholars frequently seek to participate in international legal proceedings as amici curiae. Often they do so by ‘piggy-backing’ onto the submissions of NGOs and other advocacy groups. Occasionally – but increasingly in recent years – they do so in their own names, purporting to offer ‘pure’ academic expertise, and generating certain expectations of scholarly neutrality. This article focuses on the latter trend, which the authors argue has the potential to re-shape the scholar-adjudicator dialogue in interesting ways. Under the traditional approach towards ‘teachings’, the decision of whether, how and with whom to engage is firmly in the hands of the adjudicators. The proliferation of academic amicus briefs threatens to disrupt this arrangement. It also brings certain benefits: the briefs are often more ‘on point’ than doctrinal writings, while openness to unsolicited academic submissions encourages plurality and reduces reliance on reputation as a measure of scholarly quality. Our survey of the emerging practice across various international courts and tribunals indicates that adjudicators tend to be reticent when it comes to the reception of unsolicited academic amicus briefs, however, we identify several instances of productive engagement. This leads us to conclude that it would be unduly gloomy to characterize the emerging practice as a ‘dialogue of the deaf’. A fairer assessment would be that the academic amicus trend is bringing about a modest adjustment in the way that international law scholars and adjudicators engage with each other.

On 3 February 2015, the International Court of Justice delivered its Judgment on the merits of the Application of the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide (Croatia v. Serbia) case. This Judgment concludes the Court's involvement with allegations of state responsibility for genocide in the Balkans, which has spanned more than two decades since Bosnia brought a case against Serbia under the Genocide Convention in 1993. The many judgments and separate and dissenting opinions in the Bosnia and Croatia genocide cases have not only addressed the elements of the crime of genocide itself and the obligations imposed by the Genocide Convention, but have also considered jurisdictional questions, matters of state succession, and the relationship between the International Court of Justice and the work of the ad hoc tribunals, in particular the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The Leiden Journal of International Law has organized a mini-symposium about the Croatia Judgment in order to address this important decision. The six articles in this symposium address several of the main issues raised by the judgment. A brief summary of the judgment follows.

Professor Emeritus of Public International Law Pieter Hendrik (Peter) Kooijmans passed away on 13 February 2013. He leaves a lasting void within the international-law community both inside and outside the Netherlands.

In February 2000, two distinguished judges, Judge Christopher G. Weeramantry and Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, resigned from the International Court of Justice as respectively Vice-President and President. Both men left a clearly recognizable stamp on the Court's case law, although their trademark was very different. What they had in common, however, was that they wrote a great number of highly interesting and thought-provoking opinions, sometimes of considerable length. In this article, the intention has been to let both judges speak for themselves as members of the Court, as representatives of the judicial branch which they both held in high esteem.

In 2013 the Netherlands lost its standard bearer in international law. After a short period of illness, Pieter Hendrik Kooijmans died at the age of 79 on 13 February 2013. Some time before his illness the author had an extensive and frank interview with Judge Kooijmans who reflected on his life and work, especially on his intellectual formation, his understanding of the essence and core functions of law, his experiences as UN special rapporteur on torture, his ideas on reform of the International Court of Justice, and the great changes that have taken place in international law. This portrait shows a fine man with a strong sense of justice who was fully dedicated to the substance of public international law without turning a blind eye to its shortcomings and relative influence in international and domestic affairs. The interview is preceded by an introduction and concludes with some observations on his long and productive life in the service of peace, justice, and respect for human rights through the law.

Is the concept of humanitarian intervention part and parcel of customary law? In order to answer this question the or gins of the concept, (alleged) pre- and post-Charter state practice and the relation with the principles of non-interference in the domestic jurisdiction and the non-use of force will be considered. It will be concluded that the aforementioned question must be answered in the negative, notwithstanding the fact that genuine humanitarian interventions tend to be tolerated by the international community.

Contrary to the way Hobbes has been interpreted for centuries, I will argue that Hobbes laid the groundwork for contemporary international law and for a distinctly moral approach to the rules of war. The paper has the following structure. First, I will explain the role that the laws of nature play in Hobbes's understanding of the state of war. Second, I will explain Hobbes's views of self-preservation and inflicting cruelty. Third, I reconstruct Hobbes's important insight that rationality governs all human affairs, even those concerning war. Fourth, I explicate the idea of cruelty moving from what Hobbes says to a plausible Hobbesian position. Fifth, I address recent philosophical writing on how best to understand the rules of war. Sixth, I then turn to legal discussions of cruelty's place in debates about the laws of war, showing how my Hobbesian approach can ground these laws.