This article considers the relationship between the United Nations and its member states in view of the Security Council's assertion of legislative powers. It claims that the exponential growth in UN powers at the expense of the powers of its member states cannot be arrested by legal means, because of the nature of the UN system and the absence of legally enforceable criteria and compulsory dispute-settlement mechanisms. For this reason, it proposes a different approach to law-making in the area of international peace and security – one that is built around the principle of subsidiarity, as reflected in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter. The role of the principle of subsidiarity in this respect is to determine which authority is best suited to exercise legislative power and how such power should be exercised in order to attain the objective of peace and security more efficiently. It is thus contended that the principle of subsidiarity promotes co-operative relations between the United Nations and its member states by protecting the latters' jurisdictional authority from unnecessary interference.

This article explores whether Turkey is the continuing or a successor state of the Ottoman Empire. This is a question that attracts particular attention in the context of the contemporary political debate on ‘neo-Ottomanism’. After the analysis of past debates on succession and continuity, the Ottoman Empire's legacy is considered in light of the international case law, especially the 1925 Ottoman Public Debt Arbitration. Arguments of the international doctrine in favour of and against the Ottoman continuity thesis are also explored and tested by reference to comparable cases. The peculiarity of the transitional period from the Empire to the Republic, where two governments and two constitutions coexisted, is crucial to understanding the transmission process of the legal personality. Despite the undeniable ambiguity of the issue, the conclusion tilts towards the continuity argument. Potential positive and negative, as well as legal and political, implications of continuity, including those related to delictual responsibility, are discussed at the end.

International legal scholarship to date has largely neglected the donor-driven dynamics of international criminal justice. This article advances what I term ‘donors’ justice’ as an analytic frame for interpreting the work of international criminal tribunals. Donors’ justice is defined as third-party financial support for tribunal activity. It imports market rationalities into the field of criminal accountability, which assume overlapping discursive, political, and economic forms. The Special Court for Sierra Leone provides a case study of the implications of donor-driven logics for international criminal justice, particularly the material problems of insecure funding and the ethical problems of limited personal jurisdiction.

On 30 November 2010, the International Court of Justice issued its decision in the merits phase of the Ahmadou Sadio Diallo case. This decision turned on the questions of whether the DRC had violated Mr Diallo's human rights and his rights as a shareholder and manager in two corporations he owned in the DRC. This paper analyses the decision of the Court in the light of the choices it made and the methodology it applied, and demonstrates that both issues raise fundamental questions. The Court's decision on Mr Diallo's human rights is often ambitious to the detriment of clarity, whereas the part of the judgment dealing with corporate rights does not seem to move beyond its 1970 predecessor in Barcelona Traction. While understandable, this is also regrettable and the consequences for individuals doing business and/or residing in foreign countries may be substantial.

The moral and legal debate over the separation of jus in bello from jus ad bellum generally assumes that the law of war supports this separation and the concomitant doctrine of ‘equality between belligerents’, also known as the ‘duality’ or the ‘symmetry’ principle. This article examines the Nuremberg-era precedents and legal scholarship, as well as more recent legal and scholarly material, and argues that the general assumption is wrong and that the arguments supporting the radical legal separation of the two jus's are unconvincing.

On 21 January 2011, the pre-trial judge of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (hereinafter ‘STL’) posed several questions to the Appeals Chamber (‘Chamber’)1 pursuant to Rule 68(G) of the Rules of Procedure and Evidence.2 Three of these questions dealt with the crime of terrorism.3 (i) Should the Tribunal take into account international notions on terrorism even though Article 2 of the Statute only refers to the Lebanese Criminal Code (‘LCC’)? (ii) If so, is there an international definition of ‘terrorism’ and how should it be applied? (iii) If not, how is the Lebanese definition of ‘terrorism’ to be interpreted by the Chamber? Both the prosecution and defence submitted extensive briefs dealing, inter alia, with these questions.4 Additionally, two amicus curiae briefs were submitted.5 On 16 February 2011, the Chamber issued its (interlocutory) decision pursuant to Rule 176 bis (A).6 The Chamber argues, in a nutshell, that terrorism has become a crime under international law and that the respective international definition influences the (applicable) Lebanese law. In the first part of this paper, I will argue that the Chamber's considerations, albeit innovative and creative, are essentially obiter, since the applicable terrorism definition can be found, without further ado, in the Lebanese law. There is no need to internationalize or reinterpret this law; it should be applied before the STL as understood in Lebanese practice. As to the Chamber's affirmation that there is a crime of terrorism under international law, I will argue, in the second part of the paper, that the available sources indicate, at best, that terrorism is a particularly serious transnational, treaty-based crime that comes close to a ‘true’ international crime but has not yet reached this status. Notwithstanding, the general elements of this crime can be inferred from the relevant sources of international law.

In 2011, the Appeals Chamber of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon purported to identify a customary international crime of transnational terrorism and applied it in interpreting domestic terrorism offences under Lebanese law. This article argues that the Tribunal's decision was incorrect because all the sources of custom relied upon by the Appeals Chamber – national legislation, judicial decisions, regional and international treaties, and UN resolutions – were misinterpreted, exaggerated, or erroneously applied. The Tribunal's laissez-faire attitude towards custom formation jeopardizes the freedom from retrospective criminal punishment, subjugating the human rights of potential defendants to the Tribunal's own moralizing conception of what the law ought to be. The decision is not good for international law or public confidence in its institutions and processes.

Focusing on some undertheorized aspects of Article 31(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, the present article aims to reassess critically the anti-fragmentation function generally assigned to this provision. The high hopes associated with the harmonizing potential of Article 31(3)(c) are usually based on a reading of this provision as requiring the interpreter to take into account not only rules applicable between all of the parties to the treaty, but also those applicable only between some of the parties. However, this reading does not seem to be confirmed by the interpretive approach suggested in this article. On the other hand, the use of Article 31(3)(c) in judicial settings raises a structural problem inherent in the international judiciary. The analysis undertaken along these lines suggests that the optimism that Article 31(3)(c) has recently provoked should be qualified in some important respects.

This article examines private sector complicity in governmental corruption that violates economic and social rights. Although banks and multinational corporations typically play critical roles in facilitating the diversion of public revenues away from the provision of social services, the link between the private sector, corruption, and human rights violations remains underexplored. This article therefore examines this relationship and explores the viability of a standard for assessing the complicity of the private sector in such violations of economic and social rights. Ultimately, the state-centred nature of the international human rights system limits the utility of any complicity standard for non-state actors.

Inter-state use of force has always attracted much attention from international legal scholars. Many articles have been written on the subject. However, there are still a limited number of books addressing all the aspects of the contemporary prohibition on the use of force in a systematic way. Those written by Yoram Dinstein, Christine Gray, and Thomas Franck are certainly the best known in the English-speaking literature. This literature is now enriched following the publication of a new book entitled The Law against War by Olivier Corten. It is a translated and updated version of a book published in French and entitled Le droit contre la guerre, which explains why it has been published in the French Studies in International Law collection of Hart Publishing.