The tendency to hold the United States entirely responsible for the domestic jurisdiction reservation has diverted attention from the role of the Commonwealth members in the definition of that clause. Commonwealth members were concerned with it at the Paris Peace Conference and the San Francisco Conference and, as members of both world organizations established at those conferences, have taken a lead in applying the reservations drafted on both occasions. At San Francisco it was the Australian, Herbert V. Evatt, as well as John Foster Dulles, who proposed broadening the effect of the domestic jurisdiction reservation in Article 2, paragraph 7, of the Charter of the United Nations. It was again Evatt who headed the sub-committee of the Security Council to determine international competence to deal with the Franco regime in Spain and who managed the reversal of the limitation for which he had fought at San Francisco. It was in a dispute between India and the Union of South Africa that the General Assembly elaborated on the beginning made by Evatt in developing the concept of “international concern.” In the World Court the Commonwealth countries have been parties to leading cases involving domestic jurisdiction and, perhaps partly through their capable legal arguments, have succeeded in having their views incorporated into Court opinions and decisions. The Permanent Court of International Justice, for example, adopted much of the British argument in its Advisory Opinion in the Tunis-Morocco Nationality Decrees case.

To secure greater inter-state cooperation in criminal law enforcement, Canada has entered into a number of extradition treaties. Yet alongside this network of extradition treaties lies a network of human rights treaties to which Canada has also agreed to be bound. Given the inherently international nature of extradition, and the interconnection between Canada's human rights treaties and its obligations under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, one would have thought that Canada's international human rights obligations might play some role in bolstering the protection afforded by the Charter to the rights of an individual facing extradition from Canada, even if the threshold for invoking the latter remains high. And yet, while a review of Canada's extradition jurisprudence for the past thirty years confirms that a role for human rights has emerged in Canadian extradition law, scant attention has been paid to Canada's international human rights treaty obligations as treaty obligations when deciding whether to extradite upon receiving a valid request. The author argues that if Canada's international human rights obligations were considered, along with Canada's domestic Charter obligations, greater guidance would be made available as to the appropriate balance of rights and obligations at stake, while also affording equal treatment to all of the treaty obligations relevant to extradition.

The history of European integration unmistakably shows that it has progressed step by step and is indeed an ongoing and irreversible process. One such step is the conclusion of the Lisbon Treaty, which came into force on 1 December 2009, following negotiations spanning nearly a decade. The treaty aims, inter alia, at improving the functioning of the European Union (EU) and significantly amends the treaty basis of the EU as a supranational organization. It formally establishes the EU as a legal entity under public international law, strengthens the role of the European Parliament, and significantly reforms the role of the high representative of the union for foreign affairs and security policy. Moreover, the treaty has made the EU Charter on Fundamental Rights a legally binding and enforceable instrument and has expanded the competences of the EU in the fields of trade and other external commercial relations by providing it with exclusive competence to conduct the EU’s Common Commercial Policy. The author reviews these and other innovations of the Lisbon Treaty and briefly evaluates the treaty and its implications for the EU.

Les principes généraux de droit sont reconnus par l’article 38, I du Statut de la Cour Internationale de Justice, comme faisant partie des sources du droit international public. Get article énonce:

La Cour, dont la mission est de régler conformément au droit international des différends qui lui sont soumis, applique: …

c) les principes généraux de droit reconnus par les nations civilisées;

Cependant ces principes ne sont pas définis au niveau de ce texte.

L’article 38 précité reprend ainsi, presque mot pour mot, les dispositions correspondantes du Statut de la Cour Permanente de Justice Internationale. En fonction de celui-ci, la jurisdiction internationale a quelquefois fait application des principes généraux de droit, qu’elle a dû tenter de définir.

The international lawyer sometimes reads the current literature on the Canadian Arctic with a sense of uneasiness. A wide range of writers and scholars maintain an active discourse on questions relating to what is usually called “Arctic sovereignty.” It is not that the lawyer feels he has any special wisdom or monopoly on discussions of questions of “sovereignty.” The sovereignty concept has several layers of meaning, only one of which can be said to be the special preserve of the lawyer. Public discussion in Canada is largely, and legitimately, focussed on policy questions that flow from sovereignty, from Canada's right to exercise authority, to the exclusion of that of any other state, over vast areas of arctic lands and waters. If war is too important a matter to be left to the generals, perhaps sovereignty is too important a matter to be left to the lawyers. Nevertheless, the lawyer is sometimes troubled by a tendency of non-legal commentators to blur his favourite distinctions and to question some of his most firmly held assumptions.

Since the Second World War, there has been a constant decrease of inter-state conflicts. In sharp contrast, the level of intra-state violence has not declined and has even reached unprecedented peaks. This points to a striking discrepancy between the rejection of violence at the inter-state level and the wide leeway that is still afforded to the use of violence at the intra-state level and to external interferences fueling it. This article takes stock of the main features (and serious flaws) of the existing legal framework on aid to governments or insurgents in internal conflict situations. On the basis of a combined legal and conflict-management analysis, the author proposes a radically different approach and formulates a number of legal and policy recommendations on how to tackle the complex phenomenon of foreign intervention in civil wars, where enormous human, economic, and social implications are at stake.

Several disputes relating to renewable energy are underway at the World Trade Organization (WTO). The Appellate Body has released its first decision on this subject on the feed-in tariff for electricity in the province of Ontario. The disputes raise once again the issue of the relationship between international trade law and environmental protection. Evolving WTO jurisprudence should be able to resolve many of the difficulties, although the crucial problem of the treatment of production and processing methods remains obscure after the Canada – Renewable Energy decision. Questions of fundamental theory lie close to the surface of these debates. The recent expansion in the number of international regimes and tribunals highlights the importance of approaches to interpretation in public international law. As countries negotiate new treaties to address the needs of global society, potential conflicts and overlapping provisions are likely to appear. Differences of opinion about reliance on non-WTO treaties in the WTO dispute settlement system illustrate problems that can be anticipated in several fora. To achieve workable solutions for renewable energy disputes and many others, interpretation should promote the harmonious integration of obligations, in accordance with the intent of the negotiators.

Criticized by many as the new “weapon of mass destruction,” lauded by some as the “weapon of choice in combat,” the use of depleted uranium ammunition in warfare raises many legal questions. Designed as a point weapon to penetrate armoured targets, scientific studies prove that depleted uranium has both chemically and radioactively toxic characteristics. Clearly, every weapon of war will have some affect on human health and the environment, but the laws of armed conflict have evolved to place limits on the level of harm viewed as permissible and legal. Does this “weapon of choice,” therefore, breach the international laws of armed conflict?

Although the subject of media frenzy in the immediate aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo conflict, the use of depleted uranium ammunition in Iraq 2003 raised little media attention. How could the use of such a controversial weapon in 1991 go largely unnoticed just four years later? Does this lack of global condemnation necessarily lead to the conclusion that the “dictates of the public conscience” have evolved in regard to the use of this previously controversial weapon of war? This article seeks to analyze the legality of the use of depleted uranium ammunition — the main question being whether the existing laws of armed conflict are already sufficient to address any human and environmental concerns.

The uncertainty surrounding the outcome of the imminent Law of the Sea Conference is inevitable in the light of the lack of consensus on many of the most pressing problems of ocean law. Nowhere is this lack of agreement more evident than in the law regulating the world’s fishery resources.

During the past few years the attention of international lawyers and experts in related disciplines has been focused on the crucial considerations of continental shelf and ocean bed resources. Yet the legal problems related to international fisheries persist and increase.

In the spring of 1999, the NATO allies conducted a bombing campaign against the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for several weeks. The campaign was a response to the failure of negotiations at Rambouillet, France, relating to a situation in Kosovo that United Nations agencies had characterized as a “humanitarian crisis.” In late April, only a few days after filing an Optional Clause declaration under the Statute of the International Court of Justice accepting the compulsory jurisdiction of the court subject to reservations, Yugoslavia initiated proceedings in the court against ten NATO allies, including Canada. The application was accompanied by a request for the indication of “provisional measures” pursuant to the statute, enjoining the NATO allies from continuing the use of force against Yugoslavia. Yugoslavia relied upon its new declaration and upon the compromissary clause of the Genocide Convention as grounds of jurisdiction. In June 1999, the court refused the request for provisional measures on the ground that it lacked prima facie jurisdiction. Canada and other remaining respondents filed preliminary objections on jurisdiction and admissibility. The objections on jurisdiction were based on the grounds that had been advanced at the provisional measures stage and largely endorsed by the court: first, that Yugoslavia was not then a member of the United Nations and was therefore not entitled to make an Optional Clause declaration; second, that the declaration was limited to future disputes; and, third, that the subject matter of the dispute was not covered by the Genocide Convention, which could therefore not be invoked to establish jurisdiction.

Following oral hearings in April 2004, the court ruled in a judgment of 15 December 2004 that it lacked jurisdiction. The ruling was based exclusively on the fact that Yugoslavia lacked United Nations membership and standing in the court in 1999. The judgment concludes that the exception in Article 35(2) of the statute relating to “treaties in force” does not entitle a non-member of the United Nations to appear before the court in a matter related to the Genocide Convention, which the Court interprets as applying only to treaties in existence before 1945. This reasoning came as a surprise, since the court had assiduously avoided the issue of UN membership both in its provisional measures ruling and in its decisions in closely related proceedings taken by Bosnia and Croatia against Yugoslavia pursuant to the Genocide Convention. It remains to be seen how the judgment will be reconciled with rulings already made on jurisdiction in the proceedings taken by Bosnia, where jurisdiction has already been confirmed and where hearings on the merits are scheduled for 2006.