This chapter explains how, in the wake of the reforms implemented since the early 1980s and the desire to provide a legal framework for State action, successive statutes have laid the foundations for a system of responsibility of public authorities in the People’s Republic of China. Despite the establishment of mechanisms to enforce State responsibility, the system still suffers from a number of shortcomings. Some are inherent in the reluctance of any State to be held responsible; others are more specific and outline the contours of a regime of responsibility specific to China at a time when the country wishes to assert a government model to compete with liberal democracy. In the background, a regime of political rather than legal responsibility has emerged, which both limits the obstacles to public action (in order to ensure efficiency) and emphasizes the government’s duty to ensure common prosperity. The report examines the Chinese bureaucratic culture, its history and the specificities of the current political system to explain the origin of this specifically Chinese conception of the responsibility of public authorities.

This chapter examines the multifaceted content of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 8, Decent Work and Economic Growth, and its relationship with the other SDGs. It argues that, if the aim of SDG 8 is to end exploitative employment practices, then its stress on ‘decent work for all’ should inform the interpretation of all relevant targets and indicators. This is achievable insofar as SDG 8 offers inclusive protection of migrant and other precarious workers, attending to discrimination in the labour market. Also vital is the recognition of collective voice for all those at work, as advocated by International Labour Organization (ILO) and UN reports. While ILO and UN human rights instruments and institutions inform and promote this approach to SDG 8, international economic and investment law as well as financial institutions have the capacity to limit its potential. There are, however, positive shifts on the horizon, which include transnational collective bargaining and policy initiatives encompassing state and non-state actors.

Poverty is a scourge affecting billions of people throughout the world. It is unsurprising that the international community has declared a fight against poverty. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 1, No Poverty, provides the clearest reflection of that declaration against poverty. This chapter assesses the contribution that SDG 1 can make to international law in pursuit of a world free of poverty. The assessment is made through the prism of ambition and solidarity – that is, whether the SDGs’ commitment to the fight against poverty reflects a sufficient level of ambition and solidarity. The chapter’s point of departure is that international law has paid lip service to the notion of solidarity. Through a survey of the areas of international law that are most relevant to poverty eradication – international human rights law and international economic law – this chapter assesses international law’s potential to be a vehicle for the fight against poverty in line with the aspirations of SDG 1.

This chapter considers Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, in the context of international law. The relevance of SDG 11, with its focus on urban sustainability, resilience, safety, and inclusiveness is considered from the perspective of cities as subnational authorities that are increasingly and in non-traditional ways involved in the making, implementation, and enforcement of international law. Traditional sources of international law do not deal with cities in any direct way. It is against this background that this chapter briefly engages the SDG negotiation process and the birth of SDG 11. Drawing on the possible normative meaning that the urban goal may have for how existing and future cities are designed and governed, the chapter also explains how SDG 11 intersects with other SDGs, what the latter intersection implies for the relationships and interactions between cities and different international structures as well as the future development of international law.

This chapter proposes a brief lexical history of the English term ‘responsibility’, starting from the Latin ‘respondere’, through French and Anglo-Norman, up to the emergence of the abstract noun in modern languages. Seen from a purely semantic diachronic perspective, ‘responsibility’, as a legal term, expresses the idea that one may be called upon to answer for one’s activity (or inactivity) but does not itself denote the prerequisites of liability nor hints at the source or nature of any duty to do so. It looks at what is to be done in the future, not to the imputation of a duty by reference to what has gone before. If the meaning that history brings to light is quite neutral – and pivots around the ordinary, basic meaning of the verb ‘respondere’: ‘to say something in answer to a question’ – ‘responsibility’ appears nonetheless to be most appropriate to signify the distinctive feature of contemporary international law, namely that States ‘have to answer’ for their actions.

This chapter starts from a familiar question: is State responsibility in international law usefully understood on the model of domestic private law or on that of domestic criminal law or neither? It then discusses the attractions and limits of the model of private law. It then turns to ‘international crimes’ or ‘serious breach[es] of an obligation arising under a peremptory norm of general international law’ as defined in the International Law Commission's successive works and discusses the ways in which the provisions for such wrongs seem analogous or disanalogous to domestic criminal law. The next section takes up the suggestion that a distinction between ‘private’ and ‘public’ law is conceptually and practically preferable to that between ‘international crimes’ and ‘international delicts’: is this the best way to capture a category of international wrongs that merit a distinctive response? The final section asks whether State responsibility thus understood can usefully be seen as a species of ‘criminal’ responsibility and whether it offers domestic theorists a fruitful way of ‘deconstructing’ criminal law.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 13, Climate Action, is an anomaly among the SDGs. Although combating climate change is critical to achieving the SDGs and vice versa, SDG 13 itself is of relatively little consequence. When the SDGs were developed, it had to be included, given the importance of the climate change issue. But it needed to be a placeholder in order to ensure that it did not interfere with the Paris Agreement on Climate Change negotiations, which were underway concurrently. As a result, the importance of the interlinkages between climate and the SDGs is reflected less in SDG 13 than in non-climate SDGs, including those addressing energy, industry, infrastructure, consumption and production, and cities.

The author discusses the responsibility of International Organizations under international law. With the help of two case studies (the proposed relocation of a refugee camp involving the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and a water project involving, amongst others, the World Bank), the chapter discusses three central elements of international responsibility: obligation, attribution and causation. It concludes that, often enough, allegations concerning the responsibility of international organizations owe much to opportunism. Since the current legal regime is not very helpful, responsibility claims flow like water: they flow wherever they can, relatively independent from obligation, attribution and causation.

This chapter examines the temporality around which international law is articulated, with an emphasis on the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter specifically elaborates on how the doctrine of international responsibility suspends international law’s one-directional temporality and provides discursive devices that allow one to travel back and forth between the past of wrongfulness and the present of responsibility. Such two-directional temporality, the chapter argues, is at the service of the narrative function of international responsibility in that such two-way time travel allows a re-representation of the real produced by legal claims made under the doctrine of international responsibility. The chapter ends with concluding remarks on the distinction between the imaginary and the real.

The author concludes the volume by reflecting on the interface between philosophy and law, arguing that they are both complementary and interdependent. He shows examples of the legal translation of philosophical principles and stresses the necessity to establish a system of responsibility – that is, a clear system of sanctions – so that philosophical and legal norms do not remain mere gratuitous statements. The chapter reflects on the philosophical foundations of legal responsibility, the historical movement of gradual individualization of responsibility and the shift to joint obligation to respond to collective threats and challenges. It ultimately argues that classical responsibility reduced to an essentially inter-individual relationship is technically very sophisticated, both philosophically and legally, but insufficient to face collective challenges (in particular the environmental crisis).

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 16, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions, is both the most legal and the most political sustainable development goal. Not only does it underpin all the other SDGs, it concerns the makeup of the whole international system. For reformers, SDG 16 looks promising by putting governance, justice, and accountability at the centre of development. Disappointingly, however, the targets and indicators often reduce the goal, sometimes beyond recognition. By and large, SDG 16 leaves the fragmented international political and legal order as it is. Nevertheless, SDG 16 has a rhetorical potential beyond its nitty-gritty content, and its malleability enables interpretations that go beyond those intended by states.

This chapter examines a central moral problem arising in connection with the law on State responsibility: the problem of justifying the liability of ordinary State subjects for the material fulfilment of the remedial duties arising from their State’s wrongs. After isolating the problem and explaining its relationship to the question of whether States are moral agents, it critically examines a range of different justifications for subject liability, with a focus on theoretical justifications that have received less extensive attention in the literature. It considers: (1) causal contribution, (2) benefitting, (3) duties of aid, (4) part-constitution, (5) authorisation, (6) fictive authorisation, (7) moral vicarious liability, (8) duties to support valuable institutions and (9) lesser evil. The overall conclusion is that, even when State subjects are not morally responsible for the wrong which triggered a remedial duty, there are not infrequently moral liability justifications for State subjects bearing the costs of remedial duties. However, in practice, the imposition of subject liability is likely to be fully justified only on lesser evil grounds.