Although a number of learned articles and even books have appeared recently on the subject of state succession, relatively little has been written about the practical problems faced by a new state seeking to establish the scope of its treaty obligations. An examination of these practical, even mundane, problems indicates that some of the current theoretical arguments are unreal, and that a shift of emphasis in discussion would be desirable.

The practical problems in defining a new state’s treaty obligations are illustrated well by the cases of new Commonwealth countries.

Since mid-1961, a research project at Queen’s University at Kingston, Ontario, has sought to determine which of the old British treaties continue to apply to Canada. Surprisingly enough, even an older Commonwealth country like Canada has not yet been able to reach a firm decision on this question. Thus, Professor (now Dean) Maxwell Cohen of McGill University was obliged to tell the Duke Conference on Canadian-American Treaty Relations in 1961 that existing Canadian publications were inadequate, and to urge that Canada's treaties be collected and published.

This article deals with the Protocol on Amendments to the Protocol on the Statute of the African Court of Justice and Human Rights. In particular it analyzes the legal issues arising from the jurisdiction of the court’s proposed International Criminal Law Section over corporations. After underlining the historic opportunity represented by this initiative, the author points out a number of challenges that will necessarily arise when the court begins to operate. These problems are mainly related to the fact that criminal law has developed around the criminal liability of natural persons. Overcoming these challenges will require rethinking how to apply many of the basic principles that traditional criminal law has, until now, taken for granted.

Boundary disputes constitute one of the most delicate issues for states, such that it is not surprising that frontier issues are among the most recurrent before the International Court of Justice (IC J) and have given rise to a rich jurisprudence. This jurisprudence comprises traditional areas: consent in boundary treaties, the principle of uti possidetis juris, the notion of effectivités, and maritime delimitation. However, it also includes other topics that usually receive less attention, but which are nonetheless important to states and sometimes underlie their significant interest in boundary disputes. This article deals with such topics in order to show how the IC J has handled them in its boundary jurisprudence of the first decade of the new millennium. The author discusses IC J decisions addressing types of territory that cannot be appropriated, terra nullius, private rights, state succession, unilateral donations as sources of title to territory, irrelevant criteria in establishing title to territory (particularly historical consolidation), the use of maps, and state responsibility in connection with boundary disputes.

International courts and tribunals so far have shown reluctance to delimit the normative scope of the essential security and necessity exceptions in international economic law. Legal scholars have also refrained from identifying the point of equilibrium between maintaining the core protections of international law and allowing for necessary flexibility in its application. This article argues that such stances are now untenable. The unilateral US withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, and the reintroduction of sanctions, has challenged the multilateral order. Although the sanctions resemble earlier measures, violation of the deal and of United Nations Security Council Resolution 2231(2015) has altered the normative context. The threat to the stability of the post-war multilateral order by a permanent member of the Security Council is unique. The author shows why Iran’s recourse to the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in this context should become a landmark case for international economic law and how it traps the ICJ in a gilded cage.

For the first time since the introduction of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canada is in an armed conflict with an insurgency that has actively recruited Canadians and directed them to use or promote violence against Canada. In the result, the Canadian government may ask its soldiers to target and kill fellow Canadians abroad or to assist allies in doing so. This situation raises a host of novel legal issues, including the question of “targeted killing.” This matter arose for the United Kingdom in 2015 when it directed the use of military force against several Britons believed to be plotting a terrorist attack against the United Kingdom from abroad. This incident sparked a report from the British Parliament highlighting legal dilemmas. This article does the same for Canada by focusing on the main legal implications surrounding a targeted killing by the Canadian government of a Canadian citizen abroad. This exercise shows that a Canadian policy of targeted killing would oblige Canada to make choices on several weighty legal matters. First, the article discusses the Canadian public law rules that apply when the Canadian Armed Forces deploy in armed conflicts overseas. It then analyzes international law governing state uses of military force, including the regulation of the use of force (jus ad bellum) and the law of armed conflict (jus in bello). It also examines an alternative body of international law: that governing peacetime uses of lethal force by states. The article concludes by weaving together these areas of law into a single set of legal questions that would necessarily need to be addressed prior to the targeted killing of a Canadian abroad.

This article reviews the “gaps” that allow for the creation of the “offshore” in international law and argues that these are instead constituted by constraints on our spatial imaginary of law than by any “real” gaps between state jurisdictions. The modern practices of sovereignty by states and non-state actors are at odds with the implicit geography of international law that assumes a static and fixed concept of territory. By rethinking the relevant legal spaces of international law and the sovereign practices that constitute the supposedly deterritorialized offshore, we can see that the offshore is actually onshore somewhere; we can reterritorialize the supposed deterritorialized competences. This article identifies a desynchronization between state territories and the actual exercise of sovereignty that presents as pseudo deterritorialization. Yet if both the concept of sovereignty and the implicit geography of international law confirm and reinforce one another in international law discourse, international lawyers are blind to the changing “landscape” of sovereignty in international law.

The establishment of a compulsory dispute settlement mechanism in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is intended to be the guarantor of the proper application of the convention. Yet the decisions of courts and tribunals seized pursuant to the procedures under Section 2 of Part XV of UNCLOS are in many regards difficult to reconcile and in some regards unable to form the basis for a jurisprudence constante. This article examines on an empirical basis the scope and limits of the compulsory dispute settlement mechanism under UNCLOS, as applied by international courts and tribunals during a period of twenty years since the first decision in the Southern Bluefin Tuna case until the recent decision on preliminary objections in the Dispute Concerning Delimitation of the Maritime Boundary between Mauritius and Maldives in the Indian Ocean.

This article proposes a new model for the engagement of sub-state units with the international legal order. “Trialogical subsidiarity” acknowledges that some areas are best regulated locally, but it also argues that international law has an increasing say in areas traditionally reserved for local law. The implementation of an international cultural heritage treaty by constituent units (CUs) in federal states, despite objections of the federal authorities, is a case study for the possibilities and implications of the use of international law by CUs without the filtering of the central state. This use enhances the legitimacy of international law and can lead to better outcomes for local populations, moving international law closer to its promise of being a law of peoples rather than of states.

In light of the increased risks nowadays faced by much greaternumbers of peacekeepers in hostile environments, the author surveysthe legal sources for their safety and protection. The article firstdescribes the kinds of personnel that may be engaged in peacekeepingoperations before exploring the legal rights of protection thatattach to each of them. It shows that many conventions, especiallythose relating to immunities of United Nations personnel as well ashumanitarian and human rights treaties, contain general provisionsthat may be interpreted to include peacekeepers, but that none areaimed directly at thdr problems and protection. None, that is, untilthe United Nations adopted the Convention on the Safety of UnitedNations and Associated Personnel in the fall of 1994. When thatConvention comes into force, it will impose affirmative duties onstates to ensure the safety and security of peacekeepers and willapply criminal sanctions against individuals who attack them ortheir property. The article concludes that the new convention castsa wide net of protection over peacekeepers but suffers from twosignificant lacunae. It will not cover peacekeepers who arecombatants (and the criteria for that characterization are unclear)or personnel engaged in non-United Nations peacekeepingoperations.

For our present purpose it is useful to divide the Commonwealth countries into two categories according to the circumstances under which they achieved international recognition as subjects of international law: first, the older Dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Irish Free State and South Africa which acquired international identity through a gradual process of constitutional transition from Crown colony systems to responsible governments; and, second, the colonial territories that have become independent states since 1945.

The Hague Conference of 1899 was the first to address the need for a permanent body for the settlement of differences between states. The ensuing Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes entered into force in 1900. At the second Hague Conference in 1907 the provisions of the 1899 Convention were expanded in a new convention of the same title which entered into force in 1910. These conventions established the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which in reality is neither “permanent” nor a “court” but rather a panel of persons, up to four being named by each participating state, from which arbitrators can be selected.

This article addresses the unresolved question of the international legal status, and resulting rights, of Omar Khadr — a Canadian national detained by the United States on the battlefield in Afghanistan at the age of fifteen and subsequently incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay. The article focuses primarily on Khadr’s potential status as an “unlawful combatant” and as a child soldier. Acknowledging that there has been a great deal of scholarly debate surrounding these issues, it provides an overview of this debate through the lens of Khadr’s particular case. As the author observes, international law surrounding each aspect of Khadr’s status is far from clear. However, even accepting the existence of controversy and ambiguity surrounding Khadr’s status, the author argues that the United States and Canada have, seemingly, sought to exploit this ambiguity in order to justify disregard for his rights. The article concludes by observing that this approach is, in itself, contrary to the foundational principles of international humanitarian law.

La Relation Geographique entre le Canada et les Etats-Unis est unique. Ensemble, ils occupent la majeure partie du continent nord-américain tout en s’individualisant l’un de l’autre par une frontière politique est-ouest (de l’Atlantique au Pacifique) et nord-sud (entre l’Alaska et le Yukon) qui totalise plus de 6,500 kilomètres de longueur. Les côtes canadiennes et américaines sont baignées par trois océans et les plateaux continentaux adjacents à ces côtes occupent respectivement, selon la classification mondiale, le deuxième et le troisième rang quant à leur superficie.