A new statutory right for Parliament to control the ratification of treaties for the United Kingdom has recently entered into force.1 The topic of ‘Ratification of Treaties’ may have attracted fewer headlines than some others originally proposed for inclusion in the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010 (the CRaG Act),2 but reform in this area succeeded, with cross-party support, and is now in operation.3 These new statutory provisions replace the ‘Ponsonby Rule’ in the UK.

This article examines the compatibility of the extraterritorial application of unilateral legislation with the project of international law. Focusing on two instruments, the Dodd-Frank Act passed by the United States Congress and intended to regulate the activities of US listed companies operating in the Congo and the EU conflict minerals legislation, the article challenges their underlying premises that revenues from natural resources perpetuate conflict and resulting human rights abuses. In so far as these instruments make no provision for meaningful participation by the foreign populations which are the objects of legislation, it is argued that there is a tension between these unilateral instruments and the basic premises of law-making in international law as a democratic enterprise centred around governmental representation. By exclusively directing sanctions and other disciplinary measures at rebels, both legislative instruments have the problematic effect of strengthening the exploitation of natural resources by kleptocratic regimes and undermining the right of populations in conflict zones to civil disobedience as an inescapable component of their right of self-determination.

Courts and scholars have interpreted open-ended legal norms as imposing due diligence obligations on States and other entities to mitigate climate change. These obligations can be applied in two alternative ways: through holistic decisions, where courts determine the level of mitigation action required of defendants; or through atomistic decisions, where courts identify some of the measures that the defendant must take. This article shows that, whilst most holistic cases fail on jurisdictional grounds, atomistic cases frequently succeed. Overall, it is argued that atomistic litigation strategies provide more realistic and effective ways for plaintiffs to prompt enhanced mitigation action.

The field of human rights monitoring has become preoccupied with statistical methods for measuring performance, such as benchmarks and indicators. This is reflected within human rights scholarship, which has become increasingly ‘empirical’ in its approach. However, the relevant actors developing statistical approaches typically treat causality somewhat blithely, and this causes critical problems for such projects. This article suggests that resources—whether temporal or fiscal—may be better allocated towards improving methods for identifying violations rather than developing complicated, but ultimately ineffective, statistical methods for monitoring human rights performance.

In the wake of their so-called ‘completion strategies’,1 both the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and for Rwanda (ICTR), creations of the UN Security Council under Chapter VII of the UN Charter, have for some time grappled with the question of how to unclog their congested dockets and dispose of those accused which are generally viewed as ‘small fry’. The fact that many of the accused have had to spend very long, some say excessively long, times in the custody of the Tribunals prior to and during trials, led the Tribunals to devise a mechanism for the transfer of cases to national jurisdictions, preferably those of the national States of the defendants, which were mostly identical to the post-conflict countries. The mechanism was an amendment of Rule 11bis of their Rules of Procedure and Evidence (RPE) which allowed the Tribunals to refer cases to the national courts under certain circumstances. It is helpful to trace the history of the Rule. For the sake of simplicity, only the ICTY2 will be looked at here, as there are no real differences in substance with regard to the ICTR as far as the latest version of the Rule3 is concerned.

After a hectic period of law reform, which has also provoked major governance reforms in the form of significantly increased levels of transparency and market consultation and major institutional innovations (with allied accountability and governance risks), the 1999 Financial Services Action Plan (FSAP)1 has now been completed. It has radically transformed the regulatory landscape for financial services in the EC, and set a seal on the recharacterization of EC financial services law from a minimum harmonization-based market construction regime to a highly interventionist and increasingly sophisti-cated market regulation system. In particular, the coincidence of legislative reform under the FSAP with the development of a new institutional process for law-making, which has rapidly become embedded in the financial market architecture (the Lamfalussy process),2 produced a reform agenda of immense depth and range. The FSAP period has also seen the use and development of a wide range of regulatory tools in EC financial services policy in line with the growing sophistication of the regulatory regime. While disclosure has long been a key policy tool of EC financial services law, the FSAP saw a closer focus on conflict of interest management across the financial sector, on more interventionist controls such as transparency, suitability, and best execution requirements, and on calibrating regulation to different investor profiles and different market risks. This article considers a selection of key recent developments.

The Association of South East Asian Nations1 (ASEAN) was formed on 8 August 1967. Inter alia, the five founding members of ASEAN agreed in the Bangkok Declaration to “accelerate … economic growth … in the region, … to promote regional peace … and … to promote active collaboration and mutual assistance in matters of common interest in the economic … and administrative fields”.2