On September 28, 1945, the President of the United States issued two proclamations asserting jurisdiction and control for certain purposes over areas of the high seas. These proclamations suggested the introduction of a new element into United States policy with regard to high seas jurisdiction even though the press release of September 28, 1945, which accompanied the proclamations, indicated that they did not purport to “extend the present limits of the territorial waters of the United States.”

The climate is changing, and so is climate diplomacy. Global treaties may be failing, while unilateral actions are proving to be contentious both within the climate and the trade regime. At the same time, countries need to be given the right incentives to participate in the fight against climate change and to start curbing their emissions substantially. The European Union's (EU) decision to introduce a Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) and the momentum around carbon pricing may be the perfect opportunity to revisit these ideas in the form of clubs. What if small groups of countries got together and set the pace for a new era in climate diplomacy? What if they relied on trade measures to do so? Clubs are not new in international law, let alone in international climate law. Compared to global approaches, they may avoid freeriding; compared to unilateral ones, they may reduce the risk of trade frictions. And not all major emitters need to participate right away. As few as two parties could start a climate club, a sort of club within the club, gradually catalyzing or influencing action on climate change. In this essay, we argue that climate clubs enable like-minded countries to assume more ambitious commitments and gradually pull in other countries with them.

The pioneering 1990s movement in critical theory has generated path-breaking scholarship seeking to queer law. Efforts to queer international law have produced important research uncovering the role of international law as a performative discourse and as a transnational governance framework reproducing gendered and sexual hegemonies. However, these efforts have done very little to destabilize the structures and workings of the very site where international law is theorized and taught: the university. Queering international law has mostly entailed looking at how the state, international organizations, international lawyers, scholars, and civil society produce or resist the heteronormative matrix, “that grid of cultural intelligibility through which bodies, genders, and desires are naturalized.” But what about the role of the university and its everyday routines––themselves byproducts of the aforementioned matrix––in reproducing and/or resisting (gendered) hierarchies and exclusions? We have raised this question as young scholars involved in organizing a week-long event on queer methods in international legal scholarship. The present essay is a first attempt at grappling with what the queering of an academic conference in international law meant for us, and for the university itself. It echoes a recent trend in scholarship on queer pedagogies, which, however, remain mostly silent on practices of scientific exchange. By reflecting on our efforts to queer a workshop in the field of international law, we also hope to inspire others to pursue their own queer processes of knowledge production.

On April 11, 1994, approximately two thousand men, women, and children were brutally murdered by armed Hutu extremists after a group of Belgian UN peacekeepers abandoned the school facility where they had sought refuge upon the outbreak of the Rwandan genocide. Almost a quarter of a century later, the Brussels Court of Appeal (Court) on June 8, 2018 concluded the civil proceedings lodged by a number of Rwandan survivors and relatives against the Belgian commanding officers and the Belgian state. Overturning an earlier judgment of the Brussels Court of First Instance, the Court held that the decision to retreat from the facility was imputable only to the United Nations, to the exclusion of the Belgian authorities. Accordingly, the claims against the Belgian state were unfounded. The events—which inspired the movie Shooting Dogs (2005)—bear obvious similarities to the role of the United Nations Protection Force's (UNPROFOR) Dutch battalion (Dutchbat) in the evacuation of the Potoçari camp and the ensuing genocide of seven thousand Bosnian men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces in Srebrenica in 1995. Like the Dutch judgments in the (more well-known) Mothers of Srebrenica proceedings, the Mukeshimana appellate judgment provides a rare national court precedent that considers the imputability of the conduct of peacekeepers to troop-contributing countries. The Mukeshimana judgment, however, raises a high bar for finding such imputability.

One of the most important developments in international law for the protection of displaced women and girls—the implied non-refoulement obligation in the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women has received little scholarly or jurisprudential attention. This Article presents, for the first time, a doctrinal analysis of the full corpus of asylum complaints decided by the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (Committee). It analyzes the early development of a prohibition on return to real, personal, and foreseeable risks of serious forms of discrimination against women; highlights critical shortcomings in the Committee's asylum practice; identifies key areas for improvement; and reflects on the Committee's as-yet-unrealized potential to contribute to international law in this area.

In the last few years, states have advanced various proposals for cooperation in the use of countermeasures. In this Article, we ask whether, and if so under what conditions, states may lawfully collaborate in the taking of countermeasures against other states. We distinguish five different types of collaboration: (1) independent but coordinated action; (2) secondment; (3) joint action; (4) aid and assistance; and (5) what we term “proxy countermeasures”—the idea of taking a measure at the request and on behalf of another state. We consider the permissibility of each, both where the acting state is itself entitled to resort to countermeasures and where it is not. We also draw attention to certain legal and policy considerations relating to, and to plausible avenues for, the development of international law.

This essay outlines a quandary facing international investment dispute settlement (IIDS): the tension between the wish to curb “dual hatting” and the wish to increase the diversity of those appointed as arbitrators in IIDS cases. Thoughtful observers are concerned by the effect on IIDS, either in fact or as a matter of appearance, of lawyers who wear “dual hats”—one as arbitrator in IIDS cases, and a second as counsel representing clients in other IIDS matters. Concurrently, other thoughtful observers are concerned that appointments to IIDS predominantly go to a small cadre of established arbitrators caricatured as “pale, male and stale.” This concern has prompted efforts to increase the pool of female and minority arbitrators. However, these individuals would be drawn primarily from the ranks of younger practicing lawyers who must continue to practice unless and until they receive sufficient appointments to make full-time service as arbitrators economically feasible.

Ongoing deep seabed mining negotiations evoke two competing visions of the ocean: as a vast (social) emptiness rich in wealth for the taking; or as a place where deep human connections exist despite arbitrary lines drawn to distribute states’ legal authority over it. The first tends to be the prevailing view, and the second is a challenger grounded on culture and identity. In this essay, I wish to unpack the roles of traditional knowledge and cultural heritage in deep seabed mining negotiations. I argue that attention to states’ broader international legal obligations requires the deep seabed mining regime to take heritage and identity more seriously than it does at present, and thus to provide better pathways for communities with cultural links to the ocean to be involved in deep seabed mining negotiations. In particular, I show that intangible cultural heritage, a form of cultural heritage largely absent from deep seabed mining negotiations thus far, provides more solid doctrinal and practical ground for the regime's engagement with culture and identity.

Most trade scholars treat agriculture as a commodity, and in a sense, agriculture workers and their technological replacements as commodities as well. From a food sovereignty perspective, however, agriculture is part of a food system and what is at stake in trade law is people's way of life. Peasants' and Indigenous peoples’ (and workers’) resistance against the World Trade Organization (WTO) has been an existential struggle. Most trade law scholars, with notable exceptions, have ignored social movements’ demands, including their call to end the WTO. By in effect disregarding the costs and violence of the existing trade system against food producers, trade scholarship makes social movements’ language and political demands less cognizable in international law. In this essay, I provide some context and language that may encourage trade law scholars to engage with the food sovereignty movement. I first explain what is at stake in trade law for the food sovereignty movements. I then briefly describe the underlying three pillars supporting the Agreement on Agriculture, and highlight the limits of trade law. I conclude by offering three principles—dignity, self-sufficiency, and solidarity—that could open trade law to wider perspectives. These principles blur the line between trade and the right to food in order to ensure that neither one is dominant nor an “other.”

In times of war, the first instinct is to relieve the suffering of human beings. Environmental and animal interests are always pushed into the background. However, warfare strongly affects natural resources, including animals, which makes animal issues a matter of great concern. Certain species have been vanishing at a rapid rate because of wars, often with disastrous effects on the food chain and on the ecological balance. Indeed, belligerents rarely take into account the adverse consequences of their military operations on animals. They even take advantage of the chaotic circumstances of war in order to poach protected species and to engage in the trafficking of expensive animal products. While generating billions of dollars each year, such poaching and trafficking allows armed groups to grow and to reinforce their authority over disputed territory. States have also trained, and continue to train, certain animals—principally marine mammals such as bottlenose dolphins and California sea lions—to perform military tasks, like ship and harbor protection, or mine detection and clearance. Millions of horses, mules, donkeys, camels, dogs, and birds are obliged to serve on various fronts (transport, logistics, or communications) and become particularly vulnerable targets.

In the MV “Norstar” Case (Norstar Case), the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) produced two reasoned decisions. In the first, the Tribunal established jurisdiction over the relevant dispute and the admissibility of Panama's claims. In the second, it found that Italy had violated Panama's right to freedom of navigation on the high seas. In the latter decision, the Tribunal relied on an expansive understanding of flag state jurisdiction—prompting a vociferous joint dissent by seven of its twenty-three judges. The majority's understanding of the jurisdictional exclusivity of the flag state as extending to prescriptive as well as enforcement jurisdiction is a significant expansion of flag state rights—and will have a corresponding impact on the way that shipping is regulated internationally.

In June 2019, protests erupted in Hong Kong after its government proposed an extradition agreement with mainland China. Alarmed by the protests, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party announced that it would consider new national security measures for Hong Kong. On June 30, 2020, China's National People's Congress Standing Committee (NPCSC) passed the “Law of the People's Republic of China on Safeguarding National Security in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.” While the law was under consideration, the United States responded by declaring that Hong Kong was no longer significantly autonomous from mainland China and beginning the process of ending Hong Kong's special status under U.S. law. The United States and its allies continue to criticize Hong Kong's deteriorating autonomy from China, pointing to the postponement of elections in Hong Kong as further evidence.