One of the most dramatic moments in twentieth-century international law transpired in 1999 when the House of Lords denied immunity to Augusto Pinochet, the former dictator of Chile. The “breathtaking” judgment cleared the way for the possible prosecution of Pinochet in Spanish national courts on charges of torture committed during his rule. By limiting immunity, the House of Lords’ rulings turned the world “upside down” and ushered in a new era of accountability for egregious violations of human rights. At least that is the prevailing narrative, one that pits accountability against the international law of immunity and sees Pinochet as a watershed moment in that struggle.

There has been an ongoing debate over recent years about the scope of a state’s right of selfdefense against an imminent or actual armed attack by nonstate actors. The debate predates the Al Qaeda attacks against the World Trade Center and elsewhere in the United States on September 11,2001, but those events sharpened its focus and gave it greater operational urgency. While an important strand of the debate has taken place in academic journals and public forums, there has been another strand, largely away from the public gaze, within governments and between them, about what the appropriate principles are, and ought to be, in respect of such conduct. Insofar as these discussions have informed the practice of states and their appreciations of legality, they carry particular weight, being material both to the crystallization and development of customary international law and to the interpretation of treaties.

The international landscape on the regulation of domestic work is changing dramatically. At the hundredth session of the International Labour Conference (ILC) in June 2011, the International Labour Organization (ILO) adopted the historic Decent Work for Domestic Workers Convention, 2011 (No. 189) and accompanying Recommendation No. 201. These new international labor standards come sixty-three years after the ILO adopted its first resolution on the conditions of employment of domestic workers and forty-six years after its second such resolution, which recalled the "urgent need" for standards "compatible with the self-respect and human dignity which are essential to social justice" for domestic workers. The robust, comprehensive international norms were adopted after two decades in which the ILO's standard setting has been deeply criticized and its tripartite structure repeatedly challenged to become more representative. Since additional critique of the ILO standards system emerged at the ILC's 101st session in 2012, it would be an overstatement to suggest that the new instruments reflect an unequivocally positive trend in standard setting. Even so, they offer a critical realist basis for considering that ILO standard setting remains salient and that international social dialogue remains possible.

Sri Lanka's civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka's armed forces on a small strip of land in the island's northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka's majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter's rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian targets; and for many years the LTTE controlled large parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka.