With the resurgence of the field of international criminal justice in recent decades, expectations have increasingly been placed on international criminal courts to construct consistent and authoritative historical narratives about the mass atrocity situations that fall within their purview. Taking this expectation as its focus, this article seeks to illuminate the historical narrative pluralism that can arise both within and beyond the international criminal courtroom. Within the courtroom, two types of narrative pluralism are identified: first, inter-court narrative pluralism, which arises when different courts examine the same mass atrocity situation from different perspectives; and second, intra-court narrative pluralism, which emerges when narratives constructed within an international criminal judgment are revisited in later cases adjudicated by the same court. Beyond the courtroom, it is contended that even when international criminal courts manage to achieve inter-court and intra-court narrative consistency, in practice a range of social psychological and practical factors tend to generate a gap between the intended meaning of such narratives and their public or social meaning amongst different audiences. By illuminating the historical narrative pluralism that can arise both within and beyond the international criminal courtroom, this article calls for greater critical awareness of the constructed nature of the historical narratives rendered within international criminal judgments, as well as a sobering of the expectations that are typically placed on international criminal courts both with respect to the construction of narratives within the courtroom and their reception beyond it.

There have been several cases reported over the last few years on the meaning of “habitual residence”. This comparatively new phrase is much in use not only in domestic legislation but also in various Hague Conventions on the reform of private international law and it is in widespread use by the European Commission. Habitual residence is the basis for allocating jurisdiction to that State's court, especially in relation to matrimonial causes and child custody. For example, it has been proposed by the European Commission as a replacement for domicile in the new Convention on the Jurisdiction and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil Matters. Habitual residence is also extremely important in connection with tax matters and social security. It is additionally used in the Immigration Act 1971. Other than its purpose in allocating jurisdiction, habitual residence is beginning to be adopted as a connecting factor for choice of law, for instance the Rome Convention on Choice of Law in Contract.

In most of Europe, expropriation must comply with the standards set under European human rights law. Article 1 of the First Protocol (‘P1-1’) to the European Convention on Human Rights declares that ‘every natural or legal person is entitled to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions.’ The European Court of Human Rights has stated that the right would be ‘largely illusory and ineffective’ if it did not guarantee full compensation in all but exceptional circumstances.1 It is quite clear, however, that this was not the belief of at least some of the States that had signed it when it came into force in 1954. P1-1 makes no reference to compensation. An interference must be lawful, and in the public or general interest, but there is nothing that expressly requires compensation. Nevertheless, the Court has declared that any interference with the right to the peaceful enjoyment of possessions must strike a ‘‘fair balance’ between the demands of the general interest of the community and the requirements of the protection of the individual's fundamental rights’,2 and this means that expropriation without compensation that is reasonably related to the value of the property would normally violate the owner's rights under P1-1.3

Debates surrounding the second Iraq war have prompted a range of commentators to diagnose the death of the law on the use of force, to call for its adaptation to the globalization of threats and the problem of so-called failed States, or to assert the need to defend the UN Charter framework. In this article, we look behind the shrill rhetoric of the post-invasion commentary and invite a sober assessment of the current situation. Our aim is not to evaluate in detail the legality of the Iraq war. Others have done so thoroughly.1 Rather, we are interested in exploring whether we are truly at a turning point for international norms and institutions governing the use of force. If we do confront a ‘fork in the road’, as suggested by Kofi Annan in his address to the UN General Assembly on 23 September 2003,2 what changes to legal institutions and structures are required, and what new claims should we resist?

Following doi moi (renovation) market reforms in 1986, the Vietnamese government urgently required commercial laws capable of regulating the rapidly emerging private sector. Along with contract and property laws, lawmakers considered company law essential for a market-based legal framework. Since reforms could not wait the decades required to distil normative standards from local commercial practices, lawmakers turned to Western laws for inspiration.1

It is generally considered that an international organization (‘IO’) has an international legal personality which is distinct from that of its Member States, as a result of which the IO itself, rather than the Member States, is to be held responsible for the IO's internationally wrongful acts.1 It appears to be an accepted principle that Member States cannot generally be held liable for the acts of IOs by virtue of their membership of an IO alone. This view can be found in a 1996 resolution of the Institut de Droit International, which provides that ‘there is no general rule of international law whereby States members are, due solely to their membership, liable, concurrently or subsidiarily, for the obligations of an international organization of which they are members.’2 This is echoed in the International Law Commission's (‘ILC’) Commentary to article 62 of the Draft Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (‘ILC DARIO’): ‘It is clear that … membership does not as such entail for member States international responsibility when the organization commits an internationally wrongful act’.3 The ILC holds the view that only in the case of an intervening act by a Member State that influences the commission of a wrongful act by the IO (aid and assistance, direction and control, coercion, avoidance of compliance, acceptance) could the Member State be held responsible.4

Every State in the modern world has a prison system, established and purportedly administered in terms of formal legal rules. Most such systems house both sentenced and unsentenced prisoners and have minimum standards and rules that are common to all prisoners. Although there is now a considerable body of international law that aims to provide a human rights framework for the recognition of the rights of all prisoners, the universality of the prison and the ubiquity of international human rights law have not meant that there is international consensus about what imprisonment should be used for and how prisons should be administered. The prison as a penal institution has remained firmly rooted in the nation State and in national legal systems. In this respect penal institutions are different from other detention facilities, most particularly those for prisoners of war, which have long been governed by the rules ofinternational humanitarian law.

This article looks at the origins, purposes and conflicts of national interests and policies that were the primary influences in shaping the substance of the Arms Trade Treaty, which came into force at the end of 2014. It then proceeds to a more legally focussed analysis and, having identified several important issues which have had to remain undiscussed, concentrates on detailed examination and evaluation of the most important provisions of substance. These are firstly the scope of the Treaty—defining the equipment or materiel covered (Article 2). There follows analysis of the provisions which contain the obligations on exporting States, ranging from absolute prohibitions (Article 6) to ‘export assessments’ (Article 7), which in practice will be the most frequently applicable. The paper concludes by identifying several valuable provisions in the Treaty whilst also highlighting several significant weaknesses and omissions. It contends that evaluation of the Treaty's likely contribution to controlling the recognized evils of the arms trade is premature at this stage and, further, that efforts towards that end must focus on the practice and law of domestic administrative implementation, rather than international law.

The rapid expansion of international commercial surrogacy arrangements has created serious ethical and legal dilemmas with respect to the nationality and parentage of children conceived under such arrangements and the potential exploitation of surrogate mothers. This paper examines these dilemmas through the prism of international human rights law to assess whether a prohibitionist or permissive approach should be adopted with respect to this practice.

This is a survey study of 43 judges from the British House of Lords, the Caribbean Court of Justice, the High Court of Australia, the Constitutional Court of South Africa, and the Supreme Courts of Ireland, India, Israel, Canada, New Zealand and the United States on the use of foreign law in constitutional rights cases. We find that the conception of apex judges citing foreign law as a source of persuasive authority (associated with Anne-Marie Slaughter, Vicki Jackson and Chris McCrudden) is of limited application. Citational opportunism and the aspiration to membership of an emerging international ‘guild’ appear to be equally important strands in judicial attitudes towards foreign law. We argue that their presence is at odds with Ronald Dworkin's theory of legal objectivity, and is revealed in a manner meeting his own methodological standard for attitudinal research.

Wordsworth's words, written about the French Revolution, will, I hope, still ring true: Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive. But to be young was very heaven.

– Justice Stephen Breyer's assessment of ‘the global legal enterprise now upon us’ before the American Society of International Law (2003)

In October 2000 an informal working group of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights met to discuss the latest drafts of an Optional Protocol to the 1984 United Nations Convention against Torture. The Working Group itself met for its 9th session in February 2001 and its 10th session was held in January 2002.2 The primary purpose of this Optional Protocol is to create a new international mechanism that will have a preventive role and which would operate by conducting visits to states and to places of detention within states and, in the light of such visits, enter into a ‘dialogue’ with the state concerned in order to help them ensure that torture does not occur. The origins of this initiative lie in a proposal formally tabled in the early 1980s during the negotiations that led up to the adoption of the UNCAT itself but at that time it was clear that so radical a move as the establishment of an international body with an automatic right of entry into any place of detention would be unacceptable within the broader international community.3 However, the idea was taken up on a regional level within Europe and in 1987 the Council of Europe adopted the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment which established the European Committee of the same name (known as the CPT), very much by way of an example to the rest of the world, or so it was thought.4

The prohibition of discrimination, at least on grounds of nationality, has always been a constitutional principle of Community law. Such discrimination can take many forms, since Community law prohibits not only direct discrimination but various forms of indirect discrimination. Furthermore, the Court of Justice has indicated that where discrimination on grounds of nationality is in issue, the requirement of proof is not a heavy one on the complainant. All that is needed to place the burden on the respondent to justify the potentially differential treatment is that complainants show that the requirement applied to them is intrinsically likely, or susceptible by its very nature, to affect them adversely in comparison with the State's own nationals. The modern formulation of the prohibition of discrimination recognizes that protection from discrimination on grounds of nationality is central to the concept of citizenship of the Union. Advocate General Jacobs has said:

This article examines the problem of divergent judicial interpretation of harmonized documents. Drawing on the experience of harmonization of the law of arbitration, it points out that divergent interpretation runs much deeper than is commonly assumed, and shows strong similarities to the ‘transplant effect’ discussed in the literature on legal transplants. The article examines why the transplant effect shows up in harmonization, and considers its importance for the eventual success or failure of harmonization projects.

The Convention on State Immunity adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2004 represents in treaty form a finished product of some 22 years of work 1 It indicates a consensus of State support for the restrictive doctrine of State immunity in its application to civil proceedings relating to commercial matters in national courts. It is a considerable achievement from the view point of the specialist lawyers and diplomats who have steered the project to UN endorsement.