Numerous and complex problems relating to the prohibition of the use of force in international relations have arisen in the protracted Arab-Israel conflict. One of these—and certainly not the least important—is whether there exists any foundation, from a legal point of view, to the claim by the Arab States that the Charter of the United Nations and general international law entitled them to resort to armed force in order to take back the territories occupied by Israel in the Six Day War of 1967. This claim to a right to a military option has been put forward not only in slogans flaunted in fiery speeches by second-rate politicians or extreme party leaders, but by the Heads of State responsible for the formulation of their countries' foreign policy.

In difficult times, you need friends. The Legal Friends of the Hebrew University in London, and your many friends elsewhere in the world, have been thinking about you a great deal during recent months. As your President, Professor Magidor, wrote in his moving letter on 31 July, this university symbolizes the values of pluralism and tolerance. You exemplify the spirit of Israel, with your deep historical roots and your encouragement of open debate about the future. It is a great pleasure to be invited to address you today as the Lionel Cohen Lecturer.

My subject concerns the very limits of pluralism and tolerance: the application of human rights in an age of terrorism. When dealing with enemies, politicians need to be tough. In the latest volume of his compelling biography of Lyndon B. Johnson, Robert A. Caro describes the future American president's explanation to his mother in 1956 of why he did not think much of the chances in the presidential election that year of the Democratic Party candidate, Adlai Stevenson: “He's a nice fellow, Mother, but he won't make it ‘cause he's got too much lace on his drawers.”

The threat posed by terrorist enemies understandably provokes politicians to be tough. But how should judges respond when asked to rule on whether a state can afford to grant human rights to those who seek to destroy its very existence? Or, to put it another way, equally tendentious, should judges accept that the State cannot afford to deny human rights to such people if it is to maintain the values which make our society worth defending?

Colleagues, students and admirers of Professor Nathan Feinberg take pleasure and pride in presenting this issue of the Israel Law Review to the great Maître on his 90th birthday, as a small token of our gratitude. We respect Professor Feinberg for his vast and deep knowledge in international law in general; we admire him for his particular expertise and contributions in the study of legal problems related to the Jewish people, to the Zionist cause and to the State of Israel; and we are grateful to him for the leading role he played in the establishment of the first faculty of law in this country, at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Nathan Feinberg was born in Kovno on June 6, 1895. His aptitude for learning was such that the severe numerus clausus did not prevent his admission to the Russian high school, from which he graduated with distinction in 1914. At the same time he was given a Jewish and Hebrew education privately. He then proceeded to the Faculty of Law of the University of Zurich, from which he graduated magna cum laude in 1918.

Personal characteristics may be relevant to criminal liability in one of two cases. Firstly, in offences which can only be committed by an actor with a special status (offences of delicta propria): for example, bigamy, committed by a “married person”; perjury which only a “witness” can commit; corruption by a “public servant”. Secondly, where the personal characteristic either aggravates or mitigates the basic offence. Thus, in Israeli law, parricide —killing one's parents—defined in sec. 300(a)(1) of the Penal Law, 1977, is an aggravated form of manslaughter; while infanticide—where a mother kills her newborn baby is, according to sec. 303(a) of the Law, a mitigated form of either murder or manslaughter. Similarily, stealing by an employee, according to sec. 391 of the Penal Law, is an aggravated form of theft; and stealing by public servant, according to sec. 390, is an even more aggravated form of stealing by employee.

In this paper I shall limit myself to the second set of characteristics. My aim is to examine the solution required under the law of complicity in instances where the personal characteristic, which either aggravates or mitigates the offence, obtains only in one of the participants. Will the secondary party, who either instigated or aided a son to kill his father, be held liable as an accomplice to the aggravated offence of parricide committed by the son? Will a similar conclusion be applied where the accomplice instigated infanticide? What about an employee who aided another to steal from his employer? And to what offence will the principal offender in that case be held liable?

The end of the Second World War seemed to signal to many observers the onset of a new era of international relations and international law. The appearance of former colonial entities as independent and sovereign political units led both diplomats and academicians to divine a new world order for international relations. At the same time the consequent significant increase in the number of political actors in the international system changed not only its complexion but also its manner of interaction. It appears that there are still further developments in the offing whose full significance cannot as yet be fully documented. One aspect, however, which we can examine is the increasing importance of the transnational actor in international forums. Our intention in this paper is to examine several features of this development in international relations, law and organization as evidenced by the continually increasing participation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in the chambers of the United Nations.

Any attempt to review twenty-five years of legislation and judicial criminal procedure in twenty-five minutes is frustrating, since we have at our disposal one minute for each year of activity. This impossible task was imposed upon my colleagues and myself by the organizers of this important convention, apparently in the belief that Israelis are never deterred by difficult and even hopeless missions.

We shall divide our discussion on criminal procedure into two parts: firstly, a brief history of legislation, and secondly, an examination of the accused's fundamental rights as they are protected in Israel after twenty-five years of statehood, and a partial survey of the Supreme Court's contribution to finding a reasonable balance between the defence of human rights and a guarantee of effectiveness in combating delinquency and bringing delinquents to punishment. The entire discussion will be in general terms, and many of the details mentioned will be no more than selected drops from the ocean of criminal procedure.

The task of the legislator is indeed difficult when he has to consider and decide how far to extend the area to which the criminal law applies. The difficulty is most apparent in those forms of conduct which are seemingly directed towards some individual to whom civil law remedies are available, for then it must be asked whether these remedies are sufficient or if there is good reason for the addition of criminal sanctions.

The usual considerations in this respect are many and various—has the normal victim of the harmful conduct the ways and means himself of resisting it without the assistance of the authorities; does the normal perpetrator of certain kinds of harmful conduct possess sufficient means which enable him to restore the status quo if civilly sued; is conduct of this kind highly frequent; does certain behaviour have a special temptation, which can only be fought by the deterrent force of a criminal sanction; and especially, does the public conscience regard this form of behaviour a serious infringement of public values that justifies and demands public punitive reaction, irrespective of the wishes of the injured person.

The few privileges strictly necessary for observing the Jewish rites, privileges which the last Roman Emperors had allowed to be maintained, were naturally upheld by those Visigothic kings who did not propose to abolish Judaism altogether, that is to say, by all the Arian and some of the Catholic kings. But all Jewish ceremonies were proscribed under severe penalties by those kings who compelled the Jews to opt between either baptism or exile. Under the system established by the first converting kings, any Jew who refused to undergo baptism was liable to serious punishment. For him the question of observing Jewish rites simply did not arise. As for the baptized Jew who observed these rites, he incurred the rigours of the laws directed against Christians who practised Judaism.

Abandoning that system, Recesswinth refrained from imposing upon the the Jews the alternative of either accepting baptism or exile, but he prohibited the exercise of their religious rites. The penalties were the same for anyone transgressing that prohibition, be he a Jew or a baptized Jew—the death penalty by fire or stoning, or, if pardoned by the king, enslavement for life and forfeiture of all the offender's property.

The book Core Concepts in Criminal Law and Criminal Justice: Anglo-German Dialogues is the first volume of an Anglo-German project which aims ‘to explore the foundational principles and concepts that underpin the different domestic systems and local rules’. It offers comparative perspectives on German and Anglo-American criminal law and criminal justice as ‘examples of the civil law and the common law worlds’. The comparisons ‘dig beneath the superficial similarities or differences between legal rules to identify and compare the underlying concepts, values, principles, and structures of thought’. The review essay focuses on the topics of omissions, preparatory offences, and participation in crime, all of which extend the typical criminal liability. It presents the comparative German and Anglo-American perspectives discussed in the book with regard to each topic and adds the perspective of Israeli criminal law. It points out the features common to all these topics as an extension of criminal liability and discusses the underlying considerations that justify the criminalisation of omissions, preparatory offences, and participation in crime. In evaluating whether extending criminal liability in these contexts is justified, the review essay suggests reliance on two main notions: that of ‘control over the commission of the offence’ and that of ‘liberty (or personal freedom)’.

During the 1980s the Israeli Supreme Court went through revolutionary changes, becoming more active in public life and in the political arena. Scholars predicted that the institutional legitimacy of the Court, based on its image as an objective, neutral, and apolitical institution, would decline following these changes. However, public polls showed that the Court's institutional legitimacy remained very high long after the 1980s. This Article aims to explain the lack of a decline in the institutional legitimacy of the Court during those years by presenting an empirical study of the Court's news television coverage beginning with the inception of Channel One (1968) until just before the entrance of the commercially financed Channel Two (1993). The Article shows that the increase in the visibility of the Court was not substantial enough to diminish the Court's image. Moreover, television continued to present the Court, by and large, through a mythical perspective as an objective, neutral, and apolitical body. The Article concludes that the Israeli public, unaware of the changes in the Court's adjudication, continued to award the Court support based on the Court's unchanged fabled image presented by the news media. Hence, a politically active court may continue to receive high public support based on in its mythical image if the changes in its adjudication are not visible to the public. Research of the portrayal of courts in the media is thus of utmost importance in understanding changes in the institutional legitimacy of courts.

Environmental resources and hazards do not recognize political boundaries. The basic fact that the people of Israel and of the new Palestinian entity in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip share several important natural resources compels the parties to co-operate in the protection of these resources. Neither party is solely able to manage these essential resources (e.g., water) and any attempt to act unilaterally in this sphere might harm the interests of both parties. A quick reading of the Agreement on the Gaza Strip and the Jericho Area (“the Cairo Agreement”) shows that the parties were indeed aware of this, and the agreement includes numerous environmental provisions in various sections.

In his recent book, Not a Suicide Pact: The Constitution in a Time of National Emergency, Richard Posner discusses one of the most urgent and difficult questions of current public law: How should the acute threats posed by terrorism be dealt with? This question touches various issues in constitutional law, administrative law as well as criminal law, and Posner impressively addresses many of them. Most of his account is well-balanced and highly convincing. Guided by liberal ideas and a commitment to human rights, Posner urges necessary and unexaggerated flexibility in light of a major threat. Yet regarding some issues, most notably the issue of torture in interrogation, we find it hard to agree with his analysis and conclusions. This Article focuses on those issues.

The article draws on scholarships in the areas of international law, inequality and energy justice to engage in a dialogue with the business and human rights literature, from the perspective of the global south and Latin America, in particular. It engages with Gwynne Skinner's monograph about overcoming barriers to judicial remedy for corporate abuses of human rights. Skinner argues that if victims of these abuses cannot secure remedy in the countries in which the abuses occur – because of weak or corrupt institutions, among other factors – then the victims have a right to remedy in the home countries of the corporations and in countries in which they may conduct business – specifically, the United States, Canada and Europe. Skinner recommends that new legislation be introduced in these countries to ensure that their courts have jurisdiction to hear cases, under international human rights law, even when the cases have little or no links with the forum countries. I argue that a more robust international law and interdisciplinary approach shows that international human rights law alone provides a weak basis for the recommendations. I also reflect on part of the narrative that supports Skinner's argument, which builds a negative image of the courts in developing countries, to argue that this is unnecessary and that expansions of the bases of jurisdiction should be implemented on specific and stronger reasons.

This review of Non-State Actors in International Law, edited by Math Noortmann, August Reinisch and Cedric Ryngaert (Hart Publishing, 2015), focuses on the constraints of state-centric approaches in accurately depicting the role and status of non-state actors in the international arena. As the book presents a comprehensive examination of the influence of diverse entities in a variety of fields, such limitations are evidenced and inevitably lead to the reassessment of novel theoretical standpoints, as well as to the recognition that a multidisciplinary approach is much needed in order to advance further studies on the issue.

Memory laws are often accused of enforcing an inaccurate, manipulative or populist view of history. Some are also said to violate fundamental rights, in particular the right to free speech. These accusations are not entirely unjustified. Yet, a discussion of memory legislation that concentrates on these faults might be missing its mark. The main problem with memory legislation is not necessarily with the merits of any particular law. Rather, the determination of historical facts is not the kind of matter that should be entrusted to the legislator in the first place. The role of legislation is to make social cooperation possible despite substantial disagreement, but only when such social cooperation is indeed required. Disputes about historical facts, I argue, are not a coordination problem that requires a legislative solution. Still less can they justify legal coercion.

In January 2021 the Human Rights Committee determined that Italy and Malta had both failed to protect the right to life of more than 200 migrants who perished in a shipwreck in 2013. The Committee tackled for the first time the question of extraterritorial application of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to persons in distress at sea. While finding the decision against Malta to be inadmissible, the Committee engaged in a significant analysis of the concept of jurisdiction in both decisions. This article analyses how the decisions interpret the concept of ‘jurisdiction’ and juxtaposes this analysis against the approaches taken in other international legal regimes. The article then theorises on the impact of these two decisions in helping to crystallise a new ‘right to be rescued at sea’.