The UN General Assembly has recently decided to delete from the agenda of the International Law Commission the topic ‘Relations between States and International Organizations’.

Over a period of 31 years, fourteen Reports by two successive Special Rapporteurs studied the topic in two parts. The First part of the topic (1963–1975) dealt with the privileges and immunities of representatives of states to international organizations, and resulted in a Convention, that has, however, not yet entered into force; the Second part of the topic (1976–1992) concentrated on the legal status and immunities of organizations themselves.

The author analyzes the Draft Articles that have been submitted in the course of the ILC's study of the Second part. This is done by way of a three-step application of the functional necessity concept of organizational immunities:

(1) Status, dealing with an organization's functions, legal personality and capacity-(2) Selection, defining a scale of organizational immunities for which an organization may be eligible - and (3) Scope, determining the extent of selected immunities. Finally, the author employs the two statutory functions of the ILC -the codification of international law and the progressive development of international law- to assess the contribution by the ILC to this field of international institutional law.

The UN High Level Panel Report, published in December, takes a comprehensive approach and is very frank in analysing the threats to international peace and security and their rootcauses. Its analysis and recommendations range from economic and social challenges to the use of force. This article discusses in particular the role and tasks that the High Level Panel envisages for the Security Council in light of the threats and challenges it identified. With the events of 11 September 2001 as the pivotal moment in history, the Panel nevertheless does not recommend or insist on fundamental changes of international legal paradigms, including in the (collective) use of force. The Panel's focus on reform of Security Council composition instead of the system that it operates neglects the problems with the latter and the impossibility of achieving the former.

The International Criminal Court is empowered by its constituent instrument to request its states parties to identify, trace, freeze, and seize assets ‘after a warrant of arrest or a summons has been issued … having due regard to the strength of the evidence and the rights of the parties concerned’. This article critically examines the approach adopted by the Court to requesting such protective measures at the pre-trial phase, reflecting on how the rights and interests of the primary stakeholders implicated by this process: (i) accused persons, (ii) the Prosecutor, (iii) victims, and (iv) bona fide third parties, are safeguarded and balanced.

Military support to Ukraine has been accompanied by debates as to when Western states would find themselves ‘at war’ with Russia. This political and legal discourse reminds us that international law needs concepts to identify who is a party to an international armed conflict. Identifying parties is crucial because the international legal regulation of armed conflict remains, in many ways, structured by reference to party status – even if the legal meaning of being a party today differs significantly from the traditional implications of being ‘at war’. To capture the increasingly complex co-operation patterns of today’s and tomorrow’s wars, this article identifies the contours for a framework of legal criteria for establishing when a state has become a party to an ongoing international armed conflict. To become a party under this framework, a state must knowingly make a contribution to the conflict that is of a character such that it is directly connected to harm caused to the adversary. That contribution must be sufficiently closely co-ordinated with fellow parties to allow for involvement in the decision-making processes regarding co-ordinated military operations. Applying these criteria to key support scenarios, as exemplified in Russia’s war against Ukraine, permits reasonable distinctions, also with a view to future conflicts. More widely, the analysis of party status may enhance our understanding of the architecture of the international legal regulation of armed conflict as a whole, and its ability to respond to the realities of contemporary conflicts.

The author describes the main characteristics of the English judicial system and its methodology. A central topic is the so-called judicial legislation, as is illustrated by the developing case lawwith respect to the tort of negligence. The method has the twin advantages of flexibility and pragmatism and it also has the advantages of speed. But there is a minus side also. First, the development of the law in this way can only be achieved at the expense of certainty. Secondly, it involves the alteration of the law, sometimes a quite radical alteration, without any extensive consideration of the practical and economic results such as would take place in the course of parliamentary scrutiny and debate. Judges are not the elected representatives of the people and the methodology of English Judges which results in the development and alteration of the law without the benefit of parliamentary debate may not perhaps be altogether a satisfactory democratic process to a constitutional purist.

The expansion of the Security Council's membership is presently being seriously debated by the international community. The UN Charter is most likely to be amended if agreement is reached in negotiations now underway.At the same time, a number of other possible fundamental reforms, also requiring Charter amendments, are being discussed in various UN fora. The question arises whether the Charter could or should be amended only once during our generation or many times over a period of a few years.

The UN Charter and customary law contain significant ambiguities concerning the prohibition of enforcement measures by regional organizations. This fact – coupled with practical necessity – appears to have been responsible for the failure of the UN to condemn the unauthorized use of force by regional organizations in Liberia and Sierra Leone. These cases and legal doctrine suggested increasing regional autonomy in this field. Although reactions to Operation Allied Force in Kosovo cooled the enthusiasm of those who wished for the legitimization of such actions, evidence suggests that under certain circumstances unauthorized regional enforcement measures may at least avoid condemnation.

With the black letter law of the UN Charter denying states to unilaterally intervene in third states on humanitarian grounds, this article tries to project a picture of the moral controversy of humanitarian intervention as a balance for order and justice. The author argues that some post-cold war armed interventions may be taken as evidence of an emerging rule of international law outside the UN Charter system allowing the use of unilateral humanitarian intervention to keep a third state from committing large-scale human rights violations on its own territory. However, in the absence of prior authorization from the relevant UN organs, it is necessary to address concerns of possible abuse and manipulations of such an emerging rule. The article includes recommendations to this end.

To go to war for an idea, if the war is aggressive, not defensive, is as criminal as to go to war for territory or revenue; for it is as little justifiable to force our ideas on other people, as to compel them to submit to our will in any other respect. But there assuredly are cases in which it is allowable to go to war, without having been ourselves attacked, or threatened with attack; and it is very important that nations should make up their minds in time, as to what these cases are.John Stuart Mill, A Few Words on Non-Intervention (1859)

The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is specifically charged in its Statute with the protection of victims and witnesses. This mandatory consideration is also reflected in its Rules of Procedure and Evidence (‘the Rules’). As a newly created international judicial organization, the 18 months since the very first decision granting protective measures for victims and witnesses was issued have been highly influential in identifying and laying down the basic principles upon which such protection may be granted within the context of the unique legal framework of the ICTY. The completion of the first trial has enabled the ICTY to put those principles into practice and evaluate them over a six-month period. This article will focus mainly on the experiences gained from the Tadić trial, with reference to other cases for completeness.

Of the three existing core crimes in international criminal law, crimes against humanity is the most elusive one, a chameleonic crime that can change colour over time, since it does not possess an unambiguous conceptual character. The characterizing element of genocide obviously is the specific intent to destroy. War crimes must have a nexus with an armed conflict. The identifying element of crimes against humanity is more difficult to pin down as the contextual elements have changed over time.

This article critically examines the concept of ethnic cleansing in light of the ruling of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in Croatia v. Serbia. It suggests that the lack of overt reference to it in the Genocide Convention constitutes a significant lacuna in judicial recognition and protection of atrocities committed in both the Former Yugoslavia and more generally, which the ICJ categorically refused to address. Having examined how the ICJ attempted to conceptualize ethnic cleansing as evidence of both the actus reus of genocide (particularly in relation to Article II(c) of the Convention) and its mens rea, the article then critically assesses the Court's reasoning in its refusal to rule that a violation of the Convention had taken place in relation to deportation and forcible transfer. The article then concludes by contending that the Court simply failed to provide a much-needed and workable precedent to properly include ethnic cleansing within the legal and factual matrix of genocide.

In framing investment treaty claims against host states, foreign investors routinely assert that the state’s conduct was ‘politically’ motivated. Arbitral tribunals must then grapple with these allegations. Yet, tribunals lack both a coherent conception of what constitutes politically motivated conduct and a consistent understanding of the relevance, if any, of such motivations for the disposition of an investor’s legal claims. This uncertainty points to an underlying tension within the investment treaty regime between the protection of investors’ interests on the one hand, and the legitimate scope for democratic decision-making and responsive politics on the other.

Using concepts drawn from political science, we develop a new framework to map the variety of conduct that tribunals characterize as ‘political’. Our framework draws attention to different types of influence over government decision-making, as well as differences between government actors responsible for the conduct. We use this framework to show that tribunals have adopted different conceptions of what constitutes illegitimate political influence over government decision-making in factually similar cases. We then evaluate tribunals’ competing approaches in light of normative theories spanning both public law and private law. Engaging with multiple normative theories allows us to examine whether tribunals’ different approaches to politically motivated conduct might reflect diverse underlying normative commitments. We argue, however, that many arbitral tribunals demonstrate a reflexive distrust of domestic political contestation that is difficult to justify within any of the theories that we consider.

The principle of complementarity is one the cardinal features of the architecture of the Rome Statute. Complementarity provides not only a forum to advocate overlapping competencies and litigate jurisdictional disputes over admissibility (e.g. Articles 17 and 19), but marks the foundation of the Statute as a multidimensional system of justice (e.g. Preamble, Article 1). This topic has been a focus of attention of the Court since its very inception. When taking office, the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), Luis Moreno-Ocampo, qualified complementarity as one of the key factors for the successful operation of the Court, noting that ‘the absence of trials led by [the] Court as a consequence of the regular functioning of national institutions would be a major success’. As of 2003, the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) has developed guidelines and principles on complementarity in order to clarify its theoretical underpinnings and operational features.

This article focuses on the challenges of ‘long-delayed’ prosecutions, that is, criminal prosecutions that begin decades after the conflict, using the experience of the International Criminal Tribunal for Bangladesh (ICT-BD) as a case study. This issue is still an insufficiently discussed topic even though such prosecutions are likely to become more common in the future. The focus of this article is mainly on the legal and broader, transitional justice challenges of long-delayed prosecutions at the ICT-BD. The article examines how such prosecutions have had a contradictory, two-fold effect: on the one hand, they have partially broken the endemic culture of impunity that was allowed to prevail for decades in Bangladesh. On the other hand, however, they have been highly controversial and may have served to deepen alienation of the Islamist opposition in Bangladesh. The article concludes that the question of whether long-delayed prosecutions are desirable for a particular society remains highly context-dependent and, in some cases, mechanisms other than criminal trials may be better suited to dealing with the past.

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.