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’.

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.

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)’.

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.

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 Permanent Court of Arbitration was established by the First Hague Convention of 1899 on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes, as revised by the First Hague Convention of 1907 on the Peaceful Settlement of Disputes. It is not a court in the accepted sense of the word, but consists of a panel of persons able and willing to assume the duties of arbitrator in international disputes. Israel acceded to the First Hague Convention of 1907 on 17 June 1962. Under the Convention, each State Party is entitled to form a “national group” of arbitrators, not more than four in number, and their names are included in the panel. The Israel national group today consists of the following (in order of appointment): Shabtai Rosenne (1962), Moshe Landau (1968), Meir Shamgar (1989), and Ruth Lapidoth (1989).

The hearing framework known as a further hearing has been familiar to the general public in Israel for some time. This procedure is granted upon the petition of the parties or by the justices of a specific panel of the Supreme Court. However comprehensible the concept appears to be, in view of its simple designation, this legal device has not merited meaningful attention in legal research. By law, a further hearing is a situation where “in a matter on which the Supreme Court has ruled, with a panel of three or more justices, it may rule at a further hearing as a panel of five or more justices.” In such a case, an expanded Supreme Court bench hears a matter that has already been ruled, but the Court may also convene an expanded panel in other instances. It may also do so in a case that was originally heard by an expanded panel without being designated a further hearing, in which case, it will simply be designated an “expanded panel.” This article will address the concept of the further hearing, as opposed to the phenomenon of “expanded panels” in general. The first part of this article will be theoretical, and we will seek a conceptual understanding of this legal institution. In the second part, the article will address empirical research on this subject and will present quantitative data on further hearings held in the course of over thirty years of Supreme Court adjudication (1970-2000). The third and last part of this article will present possible conclusions that may be drawn from the empirical results and will question the need for such an institution.

In the Israeli legal system, trial courts determine offenders' punishments. Israeli law only sets maximum penalties for crimes and offenses, and rarely provides for mandatory punishment. Even the few instances of mandatory punishment are subject to the judicial discretion recently bestowed by amendment 39 of the Penal Law authorizing the court to impose a sentence lighter than the mandatory punishment, under special circumstances. The broad discretion bestowed by amendment 39 created a situation in which in practice the law would no longer provide for substantive mandatory sentencing. In view of this, the reform of amendment 39 was revised before it went into effect by Amendment 44 of the Penal Law. The current law stipulates that under mitigating circumstances the court may set a penalty lighter than the mandatory one prescribed by law, but that the court must state its reasons for so doing. Discretion is witheld in cases of mandatory life imprisonment for murder, the most important instance of mandatory punishment in our legal system. The law further stipulates that only in three well-defined circumstances may the court pass a reduced sentence for murder.

Transplantation of organs from live persons may take place without any payment to the donors, and this involves relatively few moral problems. Gift donation appears to be widely accepted as a laudable and welcome form of benevolence. Even though an organ gift may entail some risk to the donor, his or her consent — provided that it is freely given and properly informed — renders such risk non-objectionable.

Gift donation cannot, however, be expected to fill the large and growing demand for transplant organs. Thus, the issue of a market in organs has for some years now been the subject of ethical and legal scrutiny, and has been addressed by (generally prohibitive) legislation. What follows is intended as a critical survey, focusing initially on organ-buying, and then on organ-selling.

The late Sir Hersch Lauterpacht once expressed the view that “if international law is, in some ways, at the vanishing point of law, the law of war is, perhaps, even more conspicuously, at the vanishing point of international law”. This led him to the conclusion that the international lawyer must therefore do his duty, in the three particular areas to which he was then drawing the attention of his readers, “with determination though without complacency, and perhaps not always very hopefully”. The three spheres which Lauterpacht considered as meriting the attention of international lawyers at the time at which he wrote, 1953, were “further legal regulation of the humanitarian fringe of the problems involved in the use of new weapons of war, sustained exposition and clarification of the far-reaching provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, and the further clarification of matters not covered by the Geneva Conventions, including the implication of the principle that the law of war is binding not only upon States but also upon individuals”. This great jurist did not live to see the current endeavours that are being made to carry out a revision of the international law of war and the increasing attention that is being paid to the humanitarian content of that law, and even more specifically, to the quest for better and more effective means of implementation of that law.

In a democratic country an independent justice system plays a major role in protecting human rights and the rule of law. However, an independent judicial system is at risk from a number of factors that derive from outside the sytsem as well as from within. The external dangers facing judicial independence are often discussed; whereas the internal perils that weaken the system as well as judicial independence, are far less known. This article will focus on the danger from within and will discuss the judicial administration's influence on human rights, specifically the right to due process under the law.

One of the central, and most controversial, issues of historic international law concerns the distinction between the territorial sea, over which the sovereignty of the coastal State extends (and by implication also its legal system), and the high seas which are subject to the doctrine of the freedom of the seas. Involved in that controversy is first and foremost the very idea of a division of the waters of the sea into two distinct juridical institutes. In the present century alone this question has been unsuccessfully tackled by a whole series of major international conferences on the law of the sea, held in 1930 under the auspices of the League of Nations, and in 1958, 1960 and 1973–75 under the auspices of the United Nations—this latter conference being still in progress at the time of writing.

This comment to Jeff McMahan's thought-provoking contribution does not aim to take issue with the interesting and rather compelling philosophical arguments he raises in support of moral-based norms. In the same vein, the comment does not criticize the way in which McMahan describes the international law doctrines governing war situations—a description which is generally accurate. Instead, I comment on the policy reasons that have led international law-maker to move away from some of the morality-based distinctions and normative choices expounded by McMahan. Hence, my focus in this comment is on the pragmatic constraints that limit the influence of moral ideas on the laws of war. Of course, the resort to pragmatism may be in itself morally justifiable, as the insistence on the application of pragmatic consideration is often linked to the promotion of laudable goals—aversion of war and reduction of casualties and damage. Hopefully, a better understanding of the reasons underlying the rejection of “pure morality” in the context of the regulation of war would contribute to a critical assessment of the desirability of McMahan's ideas and to identification of the institutional conditions that could facilitate their application.