The article introduces innovative means by which states can express their consent to be bound by treaties. Such innovative means have been incorporated in some multilateral environmental agreements that were concluded in December 1999 and January 2000. It is discussed whether limits of law-making have been transgressed by the use of these innovative means as the law of treaties allegedly presupposes that states actually give their consent to new treaty obligations, take some active step to express their consent to such obligations and do so at a time that the obligations were in existence and were known to them.

NATO's operation in Kosovo provoked diverse legal propositions. The operation was hailed as a humanitarian action stemming from a sense of human solidarity for the victims of the atrocities. On the other hand, it was vilified as a flagrant violation of fundamental principles of international law such as that of state sovereignty and non-intervention. Consequently, legal discourse is moulded by these antithetical ideological forces which epitomise the legal culture of medievalism and modernity. It thus resorts to reformulations and recombinations in order to achieve justifiable results. However, it remains external, lacking a sense of self-consciousness, because it distances the theorizing person from the object of her observation. Therefore, we propose here a discursive model which entails observation, reflection, assessment, and projection where the manifold aspects involved in a situation such as Kosovo are accounted for and new and better solutions are envisioned.

Strategic Information Warfare (SIW) has recently begun to garner significant interest among the military and strategic defence communities. While nebulous and difficult to define, the basic object of SIW is to render an adversary's information systems inoperative or to cause them to malfunction. While information is the key, the means, and the target of SIW, real world damage is the intention and effect. It is, nonetheless, an area which has been almost completely ignored by positive international law. The purpose of the present article is to begin to resolve this lacuna by analysing the applicability to, and effect of, international humanitarian law (IHL) on SIW. The author makes recommendations as to possible alterations and improvements to IHL to resolve this lacuna. [In] 1956 when Khrushchev said: “We will bury the West.” What he was really saying was that the military industrial complex of the Soviet Union would win out over the military industrial complex of the West – and note that it's industrial. What Khrushchev didn't understand was that 1956 was the first year in the United States that white-collar and service employees outnumbered blue-collar workers. […] The industrial complex, military or not, was at its end point.Alvin Toffler, Novelist and Social Theorist

On 8 July 1991, Qatar filed an application instituting proceedings against Bahrain in respect of certain disputes between the two states relating to sovereignty over the Hawar Islands, sovereign rights over the shoals of Dibal and Qit'at Jaradah, and the delimitation of the maritime areas of the two states.

On 20 September 1999, Eduardo Valencia-Ospina, Registrar of the International Court of Justice, advised Judge Stephen M. Schwebel, President of the Court, by a letter of 17 September 1999 that he would leave office on 5 February 2000. In his letter he stated that having drawn nearer to finishing his own term of duty and having achieved, thirty-five years in the service of the United Nations as well as being about to reach sixty years of age, he found no new reason to compel him to run for a fourth election. Moreover, he stated, that in view of the date of termination of his functions, he concluded that he could best serve the Court by leaving office before the election of the new President. In this manner, whoever is chosen will, likewise, be able to count, throughout the duration of his or her presidential period, on the continuous assistance of one and the same Registrar. By a letter of 20 September 1999, Judge Schwebel, President of the Court, accepted his resignation.

The bombing of Kosovo was a crude manifestation of a clash of immanent world-views. The negative of a pre-1945 horizontal and bilateral international structure by a post-1945 vertical and multilateral structure is beginning to produce a new structure, a structure of international social order, a third dimension which contains and surpasses the other two. The International Court, itself an institutional relic of an horizontal and bilateral world, is not well placed to assert social responsibility over the arrogant public-realm power which is being wielded in the name of international social order.

Following the detention of Damir Došen by SFOR on 25 October 1999, Trial Chamber III (Judges May (Presiding), Bennouna and Robinson) scheduled an initial appearance hearing to take place on 1 November 1999. However, the accused was unable to attend the hearing. The initial appearance hearing was subsequently held on 8 November 1999, during which the accused pleaded ‘not guilty’ to all counts charged against him in the amended indictment, as confirmed on 30 August 1999.

On 16 November 1999, during the Twenty-first Plenary Session of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), the Judges chose Judge Jorda as the new President of the ICTY. Judge Jorda took over the presidency from Judge Gabrielle Kirk McDonald, who left the ICTY at the end of the first term of her presidency. A French national, President Jorda has been a Judge at the ICTY since January 1994. Since October 1995, he has been the Presiding Judge of Trial Chamber I of the ICTY.

The Čelebići Trial Judgment, rendered by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia – the first ever to involve the joint trial of more than one accused – considers numerous important issues, from the method of interpreting international criminal law, the meaning and interrelationship between Articles 2 and 3 of the Statute, the character of the armed conflict and the status of “protected persons”, to many difficult questions surrounding the heinous acts perpetrated in Čelebići Camp. This comment analyzes the reasoning of the Trial Chambers to critically evaluate the significance of this fascinating case for the future development of international criminal law doctrine.

The statute of the newly established international criminal court provides for command responsibility; the vicarious liability of civilian and military officials for the internationally proscribed conduct of their subordinates. The interpretation of this provision requires an understanding of the doctrine's complex and convoluted evolution. The Geneva Protocol of 1977 created a measure of uniformity. The Geneva Protocol, along with the Delalić decision of the trial chamber of the Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, likely will inform the interpretation of command responsibility under the statute of the International Criminal Court.

On December 17, 1999 the President of the Eritrea/Yemen Arbitration Tribunal, Sir Robert Jennings, presented the representatives of those Governments with the Tribunal's Unanimous Decision (Award) determining the international maritime boundary between Eritrea and Yemen in the Red Sea. In an Award ceremony hosted by the British Foreign Office, Foreign Minister for Eritrea, Haile Weldensae and the Ambassador to London from Yemen, Dr. Hussein Abdullah El-Amri, were presented with the decision regarding the boundary.

The Iran-United States Claims Tribunal's recent decision in Sabet and The Islamic Republic of Iran sheds new light on difficult issues concerning the dual nationality of minors. In particular, the case was the first in which the Tribunal determined minor dual national claimants to have a dominant and effective nationality different from that of either of their parents. Further, the Tribunal broke new ground in its analysis of ‘the caveat,’ an equitable doctrine that can bar the claims of dual nationals. This article applauds the Tribunal's advances in its caveat jurisprudence and develops a new approach that would further those advances.

At the outset of the conflict over Kosovo, the use of armed force by NATO member states has been justified to force the Government of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia to accept and sign the Rambouillet agreement. Later on, the use of force was justified in order to prevent a major humanitarian catastrophe. But examination of the relevant Security Council resolutions and of the circumstances surrounding the Rambouillet negotiations shed a totally different light on the legal arguments advanced by proponents of NATO's intervention. Modern international law on the use of force by states, as enshrined in the UN Charter, is still at the core of inter-state relations.

With the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and the imminent creation of a permanent International Criminal Court, as well as the proliferation of public statements by high government officials endorsing the norm of justice, many commentators are hypothesizing that the long running tension between peace and justice may be undergoing a period of reconciliation. A brief review of the efforts to incorporate the norm of justice in the Rambouillet/Paris Accords and UNSC 1244 indicates that only minimal progress has been made in the reconciliation between the quest for a negotiated peace and the norm of justice. As the most powerful nation committed to the rule of law, we have a responsibility to confront these assaults on humankind. One response mechanism is accountability, namely to help bring the perpetrators of genocide, crimes against humanity, and war crimes to justice. If we allow them to act with impunity, then we will only be inviting a perpetuation of these crimes far into the next millennium. Our legacy must demonstrate an unyielding commitment to the pursuit of justice.David SchefferUS Ambassador for War Crimes The search for a juster peace than was obtainable at the negotiating table has inflicted hardship and havoc on innocent civilians within the former Yugoslavia and exacted a heavy price from the already weak economies of the neighboring states.David OwenCo-Chair of the International Conference for the former Yugoslavia

The international community's response to recent events in Eastern Europe might suggest that the right to self-determination is evolving in such a manner that it can be invoked by territorially cohesive, ethnic groups within States. The present analysis of whether the Kosovo Albanians have a right to internal and/or external self-determination tends to cast doubt on whether this evolution is taking place. While the international response to the Kosovo crisis may contribute to an emerging norm against the oppression of minorities it is doubtful whether it extends the right to self-determination beyond the existing beneficiaries of the right, namely, peoples organized as States and colonial peoples.

The third decision of the House of Lords in the Pinochet matter is significant, because the House of Lords upheld the majority view taken in the first decision: heads of state can, under certain circumstances, be held responsible for gross violations of human rights in the criminal courts of a foreign country. The decision is based on three main pillars. The Lords had, first, to clarify what constitutes an extradition crime under the Extradition Act 1989; second, to construct torture as an international crime; and, finally, to reject the plea of immunity of a former head of state in the context of the international crime of torture.

This essay focuses on the (non)application of the precautionary principle in the Hormones Case. It concludes that the finding of the Appellate Body that the precautionary principle, as such, cannot overrule the explicit wording of Articles 5.1 and 5.2 of the SPS Agreement is debatable, if a similar principle or concept were to exist in health law – a line of thought that is not pursued by the Appellate Body in its consideration of the precautionary principle. In addition, the article includes considerations about the problems that arises if substantive unity is sought in a procedurally non-unified system for international dispute settlement.