Under Part XV of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, any dispute concerning the interpretation or application of the Convention which cannot be settled by the consensual means set out in section 1 of that Part, may be referred by any party to the dispute for compulsory settlement under section 2. There are four possible fora for such settlement—the International Court of Justice, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (hereafter ITLOS), an arbitral tribunal constituted in accordance with Annex VII of the Convention, and a special arbitral tribunal constituted in accordance with Annex VIII. If the parties to a dispute have made a declaration under Article 287 (which is optional) specifying their choice of forum, and their choices coincide, that body will be the forum for the settlement of the dispute. If their choices do not coincide or if not all parties have made a declaration, the forum for settlement will be an Annex VII arbitral tribunal.1

Under the International Health Regulations (IHR), States must consider decision-making criteria in applying travel restrictions during a public health emergency of international concern. Interpretation on the legal parameters of such restrictions varies widely. This article considers whether and how the permissibility of travel restrictions under the IHR may have changed given recent developments, including evolving scientific evidence about their efficacy and shifting World Health Organization (WHO) advice. It is argued that such determinations must conform to the principles of necessity and proportionality as articulated by the IHR, and must also be accompanied by the correlative IHR duties of collaboration and assistance rooted substantively in global solidarity.

Despite much attention to the controversial lex mercatoria, international commercial arbitration remains underanalysed as a venue for contract law unification. This article considers a specific case of substantive contract law in arbitration, the remedy of suspension of performance: When will one party's non-performance enable the other party to withhold performance without terminating the contract? In domestic laws, suspension of performance is governed by clearly-defined doctrines; however, it remains unclear whether it constitutes a general principle of international law. This article places suspension in a comparative context, then analyses the published arbitral awards for indications of arbitrators' preferences.

Following the proliferation of private standards in the global supply chain trade, it has become clear that these can have adverse effects on international commerce and world welfare in the same way that government-imposed mandatory regulations do. However, the scope of the obligation of WTO Members in relation to the regulation of private standards remains vague and open to divergent interpretations under WTO law. This article starts from the premise that the debate should move beyond the search for a reasonable interpretation of relevant WTO disciplines and instead begin to consider normative questions concerning the legitimacy and accountability of transnational private regulation in global governance and the potential role of the WTO in regulating such private authority. The article explores what justifies the role of the WTO, a multilateral intergovernmental organization, in regulating transnational private standards and how a regulatory mechanism might be designed and implemented in practice.

The Nord Stream project, which comprises two natural gas pipelines in the Baltic Sea, eminently illustrates several of the ambiguities that pertain to the ability of coastal States to regulate the laying and operation of transit pipelines in their exclusive economic zone and, conversely, the extent of the right of other States to carry out such activities. A highly significant issue is how seabed surveys undertaken in preparation for the laying of pipelines should be characterized, and thus regulated, under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. What is to be considered a ‘reasonable measure’ by a coastal State is another crucial issue which, together with the extent of the requirement for consent by the coastal State for any specific pipeline route, are decisive for defining the balance between potentially competing interests relating to submarine transit pipelines.

Economic co-operation within ASEAN1 can be said to have seriously begun only at the beginning of the nineties. Prior to that, it was well known that, ASEAN as a co-operative grouping, had existed mainly with a political and strategic focus. It is with this focus that ASEAN managed to establish and maintain cohesiveness through the years despite the shaky beginnings of what has been described as a “brittle alliance” borne of a common fear of communism.2 And it is with this focus that ASEAN, as a regional grouping, has generally been hailed as a success.

This article examines the legal transfer of restrictive race-based immigration laws across self-governing settler societies in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These societies shared the common policy objective of limiting Chinese and other ‘non-white’ immigration. They each also faced informal and formal restrictions on implementing overtly racist immigration policies. This created fertile ground for legal transfers. When an innovation was found that could achieve the policy goal of race-based immigration restriction, without direct reference to race, it quickly spread across all jurisdictions operating in that paradigm. The legal transfer of three mechanisms is examined: (1) landing taxes; (2) passenger-per-ship restrictions; and (3) literacy tests. The article concludes by drawing parallels with contemporary transfers of restrictive border control policies targeting asylum seekers and irregular migrants more broadly.

States increasingly refer to ‘legal stability’ in connection with maritime zones, amidst concern to preserve their jurisdictional rights in the face of climate-change induced sea-level rise. Yet such a claim for preservation is at odds with the widely-expressed scholarly view that baselines, and their associated maritime zones, ‘ambulate’ with coastal changes. This article interrogates this tension by focussing on the understudied notion of legal stability as it relates to maritime zones, under the international law of the sea. The article examines the development of the term ‘legal stability’ in the discourse of States (what States say) and contends that a claim for the stability of maritime zones should be seen as an expression of the long-standing value placed on legal stability by States in the system of maritime zones. Further, the article presents the results of a global study of States’ implementation of the normal baseline in domestic legislation (what States do). The results show that many States have taken practical measures to secure legal stability for their normal baselines within their domestic frameworks, suggesting that existing international law may accommodate a greater degree of stability than widely appreciated. The article concludes by asserting that these findings matter not only for how we should receive States’ claims for maritime zone preservation on the basis of legal stability, but also prompts reconsideration of our overall understanding of the existing law on baselines and maritime zones.

The United Kingdom remains one of the world's last industrialized nations not to have adopted the CISG. The UK CISG debate has endured for decades, with existing analysis largely focusing on competition, assessing the relative merits of the CISG and English law. This article's analysis is complementary; focusing instead on coherence, and the private international law implications of UK accession. This article assesses contractual interpretation, and commodity sales, within an overarching private international law framework. Recognizing the necessity of existing competitive analyses, it makes the case for UK CISG accession on the basis of its complementary coherency perspective.

This article aims to draw policy lessons from the American indirect purchasers' litigation experience for the design of the European private antitrust regime in the light of the European Commission's White Paper on damages actions. The article shows that in multi-level polities procedural aspects of antitrust litigation and judicial cooperation are as crucial as the substantive standards for the success of private enforcement regimes. From this perspective the article criticizes the White Paper for the lack of procedural assessment and urges the Commission to give due consideration to procedural standards and mechanisms of judicial cooperation before taking any legislative action.

1. In his letter dated 16 February 2000 Mr Silk, on behalf of the Committee, invited me to prepare an additional memorandum on any of the issues raised during the taking of evidence on 8 February. I have also been supplied with the transcript and the additional written questions.

State immunity is highly unusual among established areas of public international law in that it has been created and developed largely through cases in national courts and through national legislation. In sharp contrast to diplomatic and consular privileges and immunities, the role of reciprocity and of diplomatic negotiation in shaping the rules of state immunity has been rather limited. While national courts have purported to apply these rules as international law, they have inevitably viewed them within the frame-work of the constitutional approach taken by the particular national legal order to rules of international law and they have looked to earlier national precedents rather than to cases in other jurisdictions. In consequence, cross-fertilization has been rather limited and the process of response by national courts to the changing functions of States in the modern world has been painfully slow. Over the past 30 years, the uncertainties and inadequacies of leaving state immunity rules to national courts has been addressed mainly through national statutes—but while the draftsmen and legislators have paid careful attention to other statutes and tried to follow their best features, this process has compounded the perception of the courts that state immunity is an area of national law, to be interpreted and refined at national level.

In November 1996 a special meeting of the contracting parties to the London Dumping Convention 1972 (LDC) adopted a new Protocol. The objective of the Protocol is to protect “the marine environment from all sources of pollution”.3 This is to be done by placing more restrictions on dumping and clarifying ambiguities in the law.

InCentros Ltd and Erhvers-og Selskabsstyrelesen (hereinafter Centros),1 the European Court of Justice ruled that it is contrary to Article 52 (now Article 432) and Article 58 (now Article 48) of the EC Treaty for the authorities of a member State (in casu Denmark) to refuse to register a branch of a company formed under the law of another member State (in casu the United Kingdom) in which it has its registered office, even if the company concerned has never conducted any business in the latter State and intends to carry out its entire business in the State in which the branch is to be set up. By avoiding the need to form a company there it would thus evade the application of the rules governing the provision for and the paying-up of a minimum share capital in force in that State. According to the Court, this does not, however, prevent the authorities of the member State in which the branch is to be set up from adopting appropriate measures for preventing or penalising fraud, either with regard to the company itself, if need be in co-operation with the member State in which it was formed, or with regard to its members, where it has been determined that they are in fact attempting, by means of the formation of a company, to evade their obligations towards creditors established in the territory of the member State of the branch.