Since its beginning in September 2004, the negotiation of the Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions has raised a great deal of interest and even tension among UNESCO member states. A record number of members and non-governmental observers have been involved, and, on many occasions, the debates have taken place in overflowing rooms. During the study of the draft convention by Commission IV, on 77 October 2005, the debate even had to be temporarily suspended in order to find a larger room. Obviously, the negotiations, which addressed head on the problem of the interface between trade and culture, dealt with a very sensitive matter. On 20 October 2005, the convention was finally adopted by the UNESCO General Conference (148 votes for, two against, and four abstentions). Considered to be a historical moment by several delegations in their closing declaration, the results of this decision was vigorously denounced by the United States. It went so far as to assert, in a declaration made public by the US embassy in Paris, that the proposed convention was deeply flawed since it dealt with trade rather than culture and that it therefore fell outside UNESCO jurisdiction. How was such a result achieved? This article attempts to clarify these issues, following the negotiation step by step as well as the dynamic that led to the ultimate result.

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.

International law increasingly obliges states to negotiate in good faith environmental disputes that arise in connection with the use and protection of shared or common property natural resources — that is, watercourses, fisheries, and migratory species. Articulation of this duty to negotiate in good faith has been vague, and, perhaps as a consequence, disputes have been protracted or have gone unresolved. Part of the problem may be that states do not know how to interpret their competing rights in the resource. This article explores the facilitative potential of international authoritative soft law to good faith negotiation where rights and obligations of resource use and protection are broadly stated and their relationship to one another is unclear. In this context, our understanding of the relevance, sources, and use of law in the negotiation process contributes to whether law functions to facilitate or frustrate dispute resolution. Through discursive interaction undertaken in good faith, states should look to international authoritative soft law to explicate, integrate, and reconcile their legitimate interests within their competing rights and obligations, according to prescribed legitimacy criteria.

The statutes of the International Criminal Tribunals for Rwanda and for the Former Yugoslavia give these tribunals jurisdiction over murder as a crime against humanity. Yet the judges of these tribunals have often found themselves disagreeing as to the level means rea required for conviction. The controversy results from the French text that employs the term “assassinat” in the place where the English text speaks of “murder.” Assassinat is equivalent only to the premeditated kind of murder. This has led some of the judges to insist that no mens rea lower than premeditation is sufficient for conviction for murder as a crime against humanity under the statutes of the ICTR and the ICTY. It is suggested in this article that neither the requirements of international criminal law nor a contextual reading of the statutes truly favours such a strict view of murder as a crime against humanity, which effectively excludes a wide range means rea, which will, but for the use of the term “assassinat” in the French text, properly anchor a conviction for murder.

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.

This article examines the history of countervailing duty determinations with respect to softwood lumber between 1982 and 2005. The piece is divided into two main areas of analysis. First, the article chronicles and reviews certain key determinations made throughout the history of softwood lumber countervailing duty proceedings. It examines, in particular, certain recurring themes as well as issues that shed light on some of the interesting jurisprudential questions that arise out of the case study. Second, having completed this review, the note turns to distill some lessons from the experience to date. These lessons focus on the light shed by the lengthy history of the softwood lumber dispute upon the nature of subsidies disciplines in international trade. They also focus on what the softwood lumber dispute reveals about the relationship between different judicial actors at the international level. The article closes with some reflections on the limits of international dispute settlement tools in highly contentious and politicized cases.

The efficacy of the rules of state responsibility for transboundary environmental harm can be questioned in light of recent disputes between Canada and the United States. Stemming from the “no-harm” principle, the obligation to prevent transboundary damage represents an integral part of international environmental law. It is reflected in a wide body of international treaties, mirroring state practice. It also forms the basis for international cooperation on transboundary and global environmental issues. This article examines how the rules of state responsibility regarding transboundary environmental damage are applied by two states that share a long contiguous border and a legacy of amicable relations. Upon examination, the limits of such rules are increasingly becoming evident in light of some recent disputes. Attempts to overlook the rules of state responsibility, paralleled with the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction, have undermined the status of the rules of state responsibility. Moreover, these phenomena highlight the difficulty of applying loosely defined international legal principles to practical situations where vested interests beyond those of the states involved are at play.

For twenty years, both Canada and the United States were non-parties to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (LOS Convention). In 2003, Canada finally ratified the LOS Convention, leaving the United States as the only industrialized state that was not a party to the “constitution of the oceans.” Canada's perspective on the US non-party status involves an equal measure of frustration/disappointment, appreciation/understanding, and ambivalence.

This comment addresses the question of the succession of states to obligations arising from the commission of internationally wrongful acts in the specific context of secession. It examines state practice and case law, which shows that the continuator state usually continues its own previous responsibility for internationally wrongful acts committed before the date of succession, notwithstanding the transformation affecting its territory. A more controversial issue is whether this principle of non-succession should always apply in the context of secession and whether there should not be some circumstances where the secessionist state should be responsible for internationally wrongful acts committed before the date of succession. This question is never addressed in doctrine. This article argues that there are, indeed, at least five different circumstances under which the new state should take over obligations arising from internationally wrongful acts committed before the date of succession.