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.

Access and benefit sharing (ABS) is a transactional mechanism designed to allow countries to trade access to their sovereign genetic resources for monetary and non-monetary benefits, with the ultimate goal of channelling those benefits into sustainable development and environmental conservation. Arguments about how pathogens are not the sort of genetic resources the world ought to conserve eventually gave way to a recognition that pathogens are indeed sovereign genetic resources under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol, and that the ABS transaction may be an effective way to deliver scarce vaccines to developing nations as benefits received in exchange for shared pathogen samples. This article argues that categorising vaccines as benefits given in exchange for access to pathogen samples creates opposing incentives for providers and users of virus samples and undermines the human right to health because it makes that right a commodity to be bought. The provision of pathogen samples to the global research commons and the fair and equitable distribution of medicines should be two parallel public goods to be pursued as goals in and of themselves. We conclude that the linking of these goals through the ABS transaction should be reassessed.

This article explores the phenomenon of ‘disaggregation’ of disputes in international law, that is, the carving up of broader disputes into discrete legal claims based on different international legal rules and subject to the jurisdiction of different international tribunals. In particular, its focus is on certain under-explored consequences of this phenomenon for the jurisdiction of international tribunals, asking whether the relationship between the specific claims and the broader dispute might affect the jurisdiction of the tribunals. Employing the ongoing Ukraine/Russia dispute, which has yielded multiple claims before different international tribunals, the article offers an original analysis of these jurisdictional questions. It presents three approaches discernible from case law where tribunals face claims over which they appear to have jurisdiction that implicate a broader dispute over which they do not. The article ends with a consideration of possible explanations for why a tribunal might follow one approach over the others in any given case.

In the absence of stringent and coordinated international action, States might seek alternatives to promote environmental protection unilaterally. Trade measures may be tools to promote environmental protection in other countries through the means of trade restrictions based on the process and production methods of a good (PPMs), but can they be used to protect global environmental concerns? PPMs are considered to be controversial because of their extraterritorial character. Inspired by other fields of law where an extraterritorial application of laws is accepted, such as competition law and international human rights law, this paper proposes a systematic approach to assess the acceptability of extraterritorial trade measures with an environmental objective within the scope of the general exceptions of the GATT. This contribution purports to answer whether the WTO forms a stumbling block for States to address global environmental concerns through trade.

Given recent data regarding fishing vessels switching off their Automatic Identification Systems (AIS) in the Western Indian Ocean, this article assesses the potential illegality of the practice by analysing national and international legislation. It shows that the enforcement of AIS laws is generally poor, and although these are becoming increasingly robust in some jurisdictions, the sanctions are not severe enough to act as deterrents. Furthermore, this article suggests that the insurance industry enables the practice of switching off AIS through weak due diligence practices. Insurers have a role to play in curbing such illegal behaviour, and it is not discretionary.

As a method for resolving commercial disputes which have connections with two or more countries, arbitration has been given a tremendous boost this century by two developments at the international level. The New York Convention of 1958—which was first implemented in England and Wales by the Arbitration Act 1975—introduced a regime which went a long way toward ensuring that arbitration agreements are respected and that arbitral awards are easily enforceable. The Convention has been hugely successful in that it has been ratified by upwards of 90 States, including all the countries of Western Europe (with the exception of Iceland) and nearly all countries which are significant commercial centres. More indirect has been the influence of the Model Law on International Commercial Arbitration, which was adopted by UNCITRAL in 1985. Although the Model Law, which seeks to encourage States to modernise their arbitration laws, has not been enacted by a very large number of countries, it has had a significant impact in that it has set an agenda for reform—even for those countries which have decided not to enact it. The Model Law has become “a yardstick by which to judge the quality of… existing arbitration legislation and to improve it”.

The success of an international claim impugning a series of State acts, or a ‘composite act’, straddling the date a treaty comes into force can depend on the weight the tribunal gives to the elements of the composite act occurring before that date. Recent bilateral investment treaty decisions highlight ambiguities on this critical issue. One tribunal practically ignored State acts occurring before the treaty came into force in finding that there had been no breach of the treaty, whereas another tribunal considered those previous acts in reaching the opposite conclusion. This paper identifies steps to ensure future tribunals give consistent weight to the elements of a composite act occurring before a treaty comes into force.