It is submitted in this article that transfrontier agreements (of a publiclaw character) between decentralized authorities can be considered as a kind of international administrative agreements. After investigation of the power to conclude international (administrative) agreements and their (assumed) binding legal force in public international law, the article concludes that transfrontier agreements between decentralized authorities are in principle of a national and not of an international public law character. This article is also focussed on (overall) legal bases for transfrontier cooperation between decentralized authorities. In this respect the European Outline Convention on Transfrontier Cooperation Between Territorial Communities or Authorities is important and will be discussed. The purpose of this convention, in force in several European states, is to provide a legal basis for transfrontier cooperation (of a public law character) between decentralized authorities. However in this matter states still consider additional norms necessary. In this respect two additional treaties have been concluded and will be discussed. The article concludes that these treaties not really are overall legal bases for the conclusion of transfrontier agreements between decentralized authorities.

In a matter of weeks or months, the United Nations will publish the Legal Guide on Drawing Up International Contracts for Construction of Industrial Works (‘Legal Guide’ or ‘Guide’). The preparation of the Guide had been formally decided upon by the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (‘UNCITRAL’ or ‘Commission’) in 1981, and the completed Guide approved for publication by the Commission in August 1987 in Vienna.

On 16 June 2004 Trial Chamber III of the ICTY issued a judgement on a motion for dismissal of charges in the Milošević case. Brought forward by the amici curiae appointed by the trial chamber, the motion for acquittal achieved limited success. While some allegations were dismissed, particularly with respect to the Bosnia Indictment, overall, the trial chamber found that the prosecution had led sufficient evidence to support each of the counts challenged in the three indictments against the accused. This article highlights some of the significant developments in the trial's first two years and the issues raised in the motion for acquittal, as well as the trial chamber's determination.

The first person to be sentenced by the United Nations ad hoc International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (Tribunal) was Dražen Erdemović, a member of the Bosnian Serb Army who had pleaded guilty to one count of a crime against humanity – murder – and another of violations of the laws and customs of war – murder. Erdemović was a soldier in the 10th Sabotage Detachment of the Bosnian Serb army and the charges against him arose in connection with the slaughter of Bosnian Muslim civilians in the United Nations ‘safe areas’ of Srebrenica and Potocari.

The adoption of the Convention in hand is regarded as a significant step in the law-making process in the field, irrespective of its entry into force. In order to assess the extent of such significance, the text under consideration is interpreted in the light of the most advanced relevant international instruments, including the International Law Association private codification process. The provisions on the general principles of equitable utilisation and no-harm are read in conjunction with Part IV on ‘protection, preservation and management’, on account of a systematic interpretative approach, and on the assumption of the interdependence between water quantity and quality issues. The general character of the wording in which the substantive principles are spelled out, will prompt their further specification, rather than change, through subsequent diplomatic, treaty, and judicial practice.

Commentators now regularly declare that the International Criminal court (ICC) – and international criminal law as a whole – is in crisis. It is certainly the case that the ICC faces a number of operational challenges, and that these challenges worry its defenders. However, one unexamined rationalist assumption is that the Court’s inability to deliver consistent outputs will mean waning influence. This article explores an alternative constructivist theory that the ICC produces diffuse social impacts that are not necessarily tied to its operating effectively. This theory is tested statistically using Google Trends data. Specifically, the article examines whether ICC intervention in a country is associated with more internet search for ‘human rights’. Taking this to be a measure of changing discourse in countries, the article finds that some types of ICC involvement are associated with a far higher interest in human rights, and that this interest only increases as ICC involvement extends in time. In short, despite its disappointments, evidence suggests that the ICC still serves a socio-pedagogical function. Though it does not fit well within a rational evaluation framework, this kind of information should be considered in ICC performance reviews.

Lomé Conventions I (1975) and II (1979) were the first regional trade agreements (RTAs) between the European Community (EC) and the group of postcolonial countries in Africa, the Caribbean, and Pacific (ACP). Specialized scholarship offers rich analyses of those Conventions; however, little is known about the role of law and lawyers in their making, and their relevance for present-day debates about RTAs.

This article advances existing knowledge in two ways. First, it historicizes the more visible role of law in constituting Lomé as a legal regime for governing EC-ACP regionalism. It then argues that the Conventions were distinct from existing RTAs due to their unique centrality on social and economic development; and from present-day RTAs, because they were conceived not simply as instrumental to but also as constitutive of development.

Second, by historicizing the less visible role of law and lawyers in the Lomé regime, the article identifies that a specialist conception of South-North RTAs was refined to govern which ideas, projects, norms, and institutions were applicable to Lomé. This distinct conception – called the development framework – was critical in creating the conditions of possibility for decision-makers negotiate, interpret, and manage the Conventions.

Those findings challenge conventional wisdom on two grounds. They suggest that Lomé was unique not for embodying a new model but for consolidating the development framework’s dominance. They contest present-day understanding of RTAs as textual manifestations of a universal concept by demonstrating the existence of competing conceptions, which express distinct notions of RTAs’ purpose, content, and form.

Despite the clear prohibition of rape by international law, no conventional or other international instrument defines this international crime or explains its relation to the international crime of genocide. This article reviews the recent precedent-setting judgments of the international criminal tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda which have sought to define rape in international law using different approaches. It also analyses the recent Akayesu Judgment of the Rwanda Tribunal. This is the first decision of an international tribunal to consider the question of whether rape can constitute genocide.

Additional opinions (AOs) – dissenting opinions, separate opinions and declarations, whether authored individually or jointly – are a distinctive characteristic of the ICJ’s jurisprudence. Few decisions of the International Court of Justice (the Court, ICJ) are delivered without any additional opinion attached to it. Yet, despite their ubiquity, there is still significant disagreement as to their relationship to the authority of the Court and its decisions. Although this disagreement is commonly attributed to the different approaches and attitudes traditionally associated with the ‘civil law’ and ‘common law’ traditions, few ask specifically why those traditions take the approach they do, and even fewer consider the appropriateness of the extension of those attitudes to the ICJ, which of course is neither ‘civil law’ nor ‘common law’. In this article, using the work of Mirjan Damaška, I offer a contextually coherent and contextually contingent understand of the theory and practice of additional opinions at the ICJ upon which engagement with this practice – by judges, scholars and practitioners – can be premised. This effort to understand the relationship between additional opinions and institutional authority will, by its very nature, lead to a broader enquiry into the very nature of institutional authority at the ICJ. Having explained the importance of AOs to the structural integrity of the Court’s authority, I will close this article by highlighting the role of various stakeholders when engaging with that practice to ensure that their institutional function is discharged.

The development of the Common European Asylum System (CEAS) has often revealed the tight interrelation between refugee law, humanitarian law and international criminal law. It has been argued that the latter bodies of law have, in fact, played a major role in the development of most key concept of the European Union asylum acquis.

Drawing from the judgment issued by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) in Diakité, this article aims to prove that this assumption is not always true, especially with reference to the interpretation of specific concepts of international humanitarian law (IHL) and, in particular, the controversial notion of ‘internal armed conflict’. In tackling the sensitive issue of clarifying the meaning of ‘internal armed conflict’ in order to investigate the grounds to warrant subsidiary protection under the Qualification Directive, the Court provided an autonomous interpretation that goes beyond IHL, thus offering another occasion to investigate the interrelation between international law and the EU legal order.

While contributing to the ongoing debate on the relationship between international law and the EU legal order, the article will consider the impact of the Court's reasoning on the EU asylum acquis, and will consider whether disconnecting the Qualification Directive from IHL, instead of producing further fragmentation of international law, may contribute to its defragmentation, conceived of as a harmonic co-ordination of different branches of law.

This article begins with a study of the political economy of welfare capitalism to demonstrate how the private quest for profit was never going to be undermined by the advance of socio-economic rights. Contrary to the conventional view among human rights lawyers, capital draws power from its rights or welfarism. It is in recognizing the role that socio-economic rights play in serving capitalism that the field of international law concerned with structurally transformative human rights can begin to explore how socio-economic rights inhibit alternative forms of social organization. This work then turns to recovering property rights through a study of recent evictions and housing rights case law of the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights that problematizes structural inequities and calls the financialized capitalist system into question. Next this work investigates radical legal positivism in international indigenous rights jurisprudence for how it transcends the private ownership of indigenous lands and control over the means of production. The social function of property rights is then revisited and extended, drawing to a close an article that unearths how socio-economic rights might yet emancipate people from capitalist property relations, alter the underlying structure of the economy, and, in time, sever its concordance with the capitalist welfare state.

More than a decade after the end of the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the issue of missing persons remains a major obstacle to reconciliation. With a focus on Bosnia and Herzegovina, this article looks at the phenomenon of missing persons and reviews the scope of the legal protection available to the victims and their family members, as well as some of the institutional efforts to shed light on their fate. The article describes the progressive development of the jurisprudence of the Human Rights Chamber for Bosnia and Herzegovina, a court modelled on the procedures of the European Court of Human Rights, which held that Bosnian authorities who are withholding from family members information about missing persons are violating their right not to be subjected to inhuman or degrading treatment and their right to respect for private and family life. It further illustrates the positive effects on politicians and lawmakers which can emanate from transitional justice.

Even though Article 23 of the 1982 Convention on the Law of the Sea explicitly acknowledges the right of innocent passage through the territorial sea to nuclear vessels, many coastal states have recently forbidden or submitted to authorization the passage of ships carrying radioactive materials: this reveals a trend towards a more restrictive concept of “innocent passage.” As to straits used for international navigation and archipelagic sea lanes, the ius communicationis is still prominent and every measure that might prejudice the navigational rights of nuclear ships would not be consistent with the Montego Bay Convention.

This presentation is twofold. The first part shows that the Nicaragua case played a significant role in reconciling the Third World with the International Court of Justice and, more generally, in revitalizing the Court. In the second part, the author, who was counsel for Nicaragua in that case, casts an eye as external analyst on the judgments of 1984, about which he has some reluctance, and 1986, which he largely approves of, even though Nicaragua did not win 100 per cent and some points may be debatable.

Why all this interest in the history of international law today? A partial explanation can surely be found from the end of the 20-year period of liberal-internationalist ascendancy (1989–2008) and the perplexity that has followed its demise. Mark Zuckerberg put it succinctly in a manifesto on Building Global Community in Facebook in February 2017. When his company started, he noted, it was to ‘bring . . . us closer together and build . . . a global community’. ‘[T]his idea’, he suggested, ‘was not controversial’. But suddenly there has emerged a ‘movement for withdrawing from global connection’. Nor have international law scholars rested silent. Eric Posner has termed the present moment – with glee – as the ‘backlash’ against ‘liberal cosmopolitanism’. More soberly, perhaps, Philip Alston has noted the rise of ‘challenges [to] the human rights movement’ that are ‘fundamentally different from much of what has gone before’ while James Crawford has warned against ‘large-scale retreat into nativism and unilateralism’. What used to be a clear and broadly shared objective – building of a global community – is no longer so clearly visible. So, the temptation might be to look backwards instead and ask, ‘how did we get here?’.

The purpose of this article is to examine the attitude of the International Court of Justice toward questions concerning different aspects of the international arbitration process. This relates in particular to disputes over the obligation to submit an alleged dispute to arbitration, disputes over the validity or nullity of an award rendered in an international arbitration process, and appeals to the International Court from other bodies with a power of dispositive decision. These questions have arisen in many different circumstances. The matter is also important having regard to the presence of compromissory clauses in international treaties conferring jurisdiction on the International Court itself, but only after it is clear that a process of arbitration, as the preferred method of dispute settlement, is not going to be successful in the concrete case.

In November 1994 the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY), indicted its first accused, Dragan Nikolić. It was not until over five years later, however, in April 2000, that he was finally arrested and transferred to The Hague. The circumstances of his arrest – which reportedly featured his being violently abducted from his home in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (FRY) by Serbian criminals before being transferred to the NATO-led Stabilization Force in Bosnia and Herzegovina and, ultimately, to the ICTY in The Hague – were the subject of a pre-trial motion. Nikolić's defence counsel asserted that the nature of his capture was such that the appropriate remedy was to dismiss the charges against him and order his return to the FRY. They made this assertion despite an admission, for the purposes of the motion, that the captors lacked any connection with SFOR or the ICTY. The trial chamber rejected the motion. In reaching its decision, the trial chamber considered fundamental issues about what constituted an illegal capture for the purposes of the ICTY and, without explicitly doing so, appeared to reject the view of the Court in Eichmann that a person may not oppose his being tried by reason of the illegality of his capture.

In this monograph Professor Tai-Heng Cheng purports to set up a global perspective on the role of international law in international relations, and in particular on the conditions and ways through which it can be effective. The perspective is the one of the ‘rational’ decision-maker, in the best vein of the New Haven school, whose theoretical framework the author espouses completely and thoroughly. The book is a valuable contribution to international legal theory; it is not written in abstract and hollow words, but on the basis of a practical enquiry based on many examples. By adopting this perspective, it provides the reader with many interesting insights. In particular, it is enriching for the European reader, who is not used to this genuinely ‘US–American’ perspective. The various chapters of the book are as follows: ‘Confronting Anxieties about International Law’; ‘The Politics of Theorizing’; ‘Legalism and Morality’; ‘Judges’; ‘Arbitrators’; ‘Regulators’; ‘Legal Advisors’; ‘Officials’; and ‘Law beyond Cases’. The purpose of these lines is not to give a full account of that book. Nor is it to portray the numerous thought-provoking and fruitful aspects of the developments contained therein; nor, by the way, is it to criticize some points on which the ‘Europeans’ will easily disagree with the author, as on what is permitted to the US officials in Guantánamo (p. 227 ff.). The point is rather to spell out some cardinal aspects, which seem to the present author to be weaknesses of the general approach or inadequacies of particular points. The critical approach, which will here be put forward, should not lead the reader to believe that the book presently criticized is devoid of merit. On the contrary, the author of these lines would not have ventured into the exercise of writing an essay on it if he had believed that such was the case.