In November 1945, the British colonial authorities convened a court martial of members of the Indian National Army, which had fought alongside the Japanese in the Asia-Pacific War. Three defendants were charged with ‘waging war against the King’ – the equivalent of treason, set out in Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code.

At the heart of the case was the question of allegiance. The chief defence counsel, Bhulabhai Desai, had the task of presenting a legitimate – i.e., non-treasonable – exception to the duty of allegiance to a state during a war. Drawing on Hobbesian themes, Desai insisted that a specific event – the fall of Singapore – had convinced the surrendered Indian troops of the British Army that Britain was no longer capable of protecting their interests. Further, he questioned the very premise of the ‘waging war against the King’ charge, by arguing that during a war of liberation the justice of the challenger eclipsed the security of the challenged.

Desai's approach influenced Radhabinod Pal, who would take these arguments to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East. Pal, like Desai, took as his starting point the differing interests of the powerful states and their colonies. He argued that the Allies’ motives for creating the new charge of ‘crimes against peace’ were highly suspect, considering their own history of violence towards the non-Western world. Would it not potentially immobilize the struggle against colonialism? And, pace Hobbes, could not a colonized state's duty of allegiance to the society of states be relinquished?

The World Health Organization (WHO) had, among other things, been examining and deliberating the hazardous effects to health by the use of nuclear weapons. These discussions culminated in a resolution which requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons in the following terms: [i]n view of the health and environmental effects, would the use of nuclear weapons by a Stare in war or other armed conflict be a breach of its obligations under international law including the WHO Constitution?

In 1954, following the US explosion of a large thermonuclear device in the South Pacific, Prime Minister Nehru of India led the first international call for a comprehensive ban on nuclear testing. It took until 10 September 1996 for the General Assembly of the United Nations to adopt the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty (CTBT). As at the end of April 1997, it had been signed by 142 states including the five nuclear-weapon states.

[…] risks and conflicts of interest can be overcome by rules of conduct adequate to the challenges of life if a conscious effort is made to foresee and counter the problems likely to emmerge.

The Hague Convention on Cultural property of 1954 prohibits the transfer by the occupier of cultural property from territory occupied by him. Under the Protocol annexed to the said Convention, the parties to it undertake to return cultural property transferred in contravention of the Convention to their countries of origin. These provisions arc clearly inadequate when dealing with Jewish cultural property looted by Nazi-Germany and its collaborators in the course of World War II. Jewish cultural heritage was usually considered as endangering the cultural heritage of the host nations and, consequently, subject to harassment and destruction. It would therefore seem inequitable to return looted Jewish cultural property (representing the cultural heritage of the Jewish people) to (those countries from which it was looted; the proper recipient of this heritage (also by virtue of the principle of self-determination) is the Jewish people represented by the State of Israel and the major contemporary Jewish communities around the world.

The difficulties surrounding the entry-into-force of the CTBT, which have become more pressing after the refusal of the American Senate to ratify the treaty, have their origin in divergent perceptions of different groups of states about the relationship between the NPT and the CTBT in terms of non-proliferation and nuclear disarmament. Still, preparations for the implementation of the treaty continue unabated. It can be upheld that given the current legal status of the CTBT there already exists a prohibition on the carrying out of nuclear test explosions anywhere for all States Signatories of the CTBT, at least as long as they have not indicated not to become a Party to the treaty.

In accordance with Article 15 of its Statute, the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) adopted its Rules of Procedure and Evidence on 11 February 1994. This text entered into force on 14 March 1994. It is essential not only for the Tribunal itself in its present work in The Hague, but also as a reference for any other international criminal courts and tribunals currently existing or forthcoming. Largely inspired by the national rules of adversarial systems, the Rules rightly put the emphasis on the rights of the accused. However, they must also ensure the protection of victims and witnesses and, generally, the efficiency of the Tribunal, objectives that cannot be addressed on an international level in the same manner as on a national level. Moreover, all of these objectives must be reconciled in order to guarantee a fair trial. As Trial Chamber II of the ICTY emphasized in its response to the prosecutor's request for protection of victims and witnesses in the Tadić case, “[a] fair trial means not only fair treatment to the defendant but also to the prosecution and to the witnesses.”

United Nations peace-keeping is presently being faced with dynamic new challenges. The concept of peace-keeping is rapidly expanding, operations are being entrusted with new and innovative tasks, and are increasingly being deployed in intrastate conflicts. As the functions of peace-keepers vary, so too does the role and conception of peace-keeping. The new tasks entrusted to peace-keepers have brought with them new problems and difficulties. Controversial recent operations, such as those in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, have particularly raised the issue of impartiality in the context of UN peace-keeping. Impartiality is traditionally a distinguishing feature of peace-keeping operations, yet its meaning and status remain unclear.

On 5 July 2018, the European Parliament adopted a recommendation to the Council endorsing a proposal for the establishment of a United Nations Parliamentary Assembly. Conceived as a new primary organ of the United Nations (UN), the Parliamentary Assembly aims at complementing the work of the General Assembly by giving direct representation to the peoples of the world and passing binding legislation. This article reconstructs the historical roots of the proposal and speculates about the possible legal implications for both the UN and its member states stemming from the establishment of an elected citizens’ chamber within an intergovernmental organization. An argument is made that in order to achieve the stated goals of the model of United Nations Parliamentary Assembly endorsed by the European Union (EU), the required institutional changes to the UN system would be so radical as to effectively repudiate it in favour of a newly established system of international co-operation.

The paper analyses the dynamic procedures that work during the formation of international law in international organizations and conventional frameworks. These procedures organize and structure the interactive exercise of the normative function by law-creating bodies and law-applying bodies. The paper conceives of this ‘way’ of making international law as a law-making method that the concept of standardization helps to understand. Grounded in Aristotelian dialectic logic, standardization indeed conceptualizes the dialogic and procedural law-making that works for normative coherence in contexts characterized by co-operation and the heterogeneity of interests. Introducing this concept, the paper insists on the fact that it is the procedural nature of the dialogue that is crucial to reach normative coherence. Drawing on the consequences of standardization, and regarding dynamic procedures, it reappraises the status and the importance of both the different sources of international law and the different participants to international law-making. Also, the paper points out the predominance of normative coherence, as well as that of its ‘guarantor’, namely procedure that its author considers the cornerstone of legal certainty in the co-operative context of the international society.

No single political issue has engaged the ICJ more than that of South West Africa (Namibia). Over a period ranging from 1949 through 1971, recourse was had to the Court, both in its advisory and contentious capacities, on various aspects of the problem. Even today, after Namibia attained independence, the Court's jurisprudence and the saga of UN-Court relations in this matter continue to intrigue. This is because the questions raised have continuing relevance to many issues bearing on international law and international relations.

Much has been, and will be, written on the approach of the Court and of individual judges to a panoply of international legal questions raised in the course of the judicial proceedings. But, in fact, the long tale also offers researchers an enticing fountain of material on the role of law and adjudication in international relations, on the interaction between the UN judicial and political fora and, more broadly, between law and politics. This article focuses mainly on these latter, relatively neglected, aspects because it is with respect to these that the benefit of hindsight offers the ability to reassess and revise some of the earlier assumptions and to note some interesting paradoxes not readily discernible at the time. Perhaps revision of some of the axiomatic propositions long perpetuated in the field will offer better guidance to those seeking to enhance the role of international adjudication in world affairs.

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.

The quantity of man-made space objects, ranging from abandoned launch vehicle stages to fragmentation debris, is remarkable. At the time, the drafters of the Outer Space Treaty did not (and perhaps could not) anticipate how great the problem of debris in outer space would one day become. As a result, they only drafted general provisions for the protection of the space environment which are generally deemed insufficient. This article aims to demonstrate that both general rules of international law and the UNCOPUOS Debris Mitigation Guidelines come to the rescue in addressing the space debris issue as they complement and complete the general obligations contained in the Outer Space Treaty. Particular attention is paid to anti-satellite weapon tests, which have catastrophic consequences in terms of creating debris but nonetheless continue to be carried out. Finally, it ascertains whether an obligation on states to actively remove their space debris exists.

The fate of Chinese legal scholarship appears to have been closely linked to the chronological development of legal education in China. The periods of incubation of legal scholarship covered nearly three decades of internal strife and political turmoil from 1949 to 1978. The rebirth of Chinese legal scholarship did not take place immediately upon China's return to the United Nations (in 1971). This return, however, marked the first sign of a change of policy towards legal scholarship.

The author briefly describes the history, development and current status of (Chinese) legal scholarship and attitude towards international law in China.

Reprisals originally served individuals seeking redress for an injustice suffered abroad. The concept, however, has undergone extensive development. Nowadays, reprisals are -in themselves illegal- retaliatory measures used by one state seeking redress for an illegal act committed by another. The prerequisites for legal reprisals areformulated in the Naulilaa Incident arbitration of 1928. In her examination of the recent history of the concept of reprisals, this arbitration is the author's starting point. After this examination she compares reprisals to other methods of redress. Finally, she investigates the limitation of the use of reprisals as laid down in humanitarian law treaties.

The present article describes the dispute settlement system of the Organization of the Islamic Conference through the envisaged creation of the International Islamic Court of Justice. The Court's Statute, adopted in 1987, considers the Islamic Shari'ah or Islamic law as the fundamental law to be applied by the Court for the resolution of international disputes. Therefore, the Court will have a religious character considering a local religious code as the primary applicable law. The International Islamic Court of Justice has not yet been set up. Its creation might have the effect of grouping Islamic states under the same international judicial system, and of causing a strong political impact in respect of the relations with the State of Israel and of the Palestinian question.