In recent publications a rising tide of criticism directed against the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) is discernible, principally concerning whether or not the ICTY grants the accused a fair trial. The perceived lack of ability, or willingness, to satisfy the highest standards of human rights concerning the right of accused to a fair trial is regarded as a death-knell both for the broad acceptance of the ICTY's jurisprudence as well as the prospects for a permanent international criminal court. While most of the criticism centres around the interpretation and application of provisions of the ICTY's Statute and Rules of Procedure and Evidence addressing the right to a fair trial, some of it concerns the vigorousness with which ICTY officials insist upon the surrender of indicted persons. With all due respect these commentators, by applying norms that are not wholly applicable, misconceive the threat to the accused's fair trial rights.

Intellectual clashes over the nature of international law have been raging throughout the traceable history of the discipline. Naturalists, positivists, idealists, pragmatists, formalists, realists, and so forth, have striven to put forward and defend credible paradigms of international legal order. The common characteristic of each new wave of criticism has been its unsettling disposition. It arrived stridently with questions and doubts, often seeking reform and often reconceptualization and transcendence. A second common characteristic, notably in the post-enlightenment period, has been the marginalized position of the debate on the merit of each new wave, within and outside legal academia. Indeed, debate over unsettling questions seems to have been exempted from the habitual professional responsibilities of the overwhelming majority of international lawyers. Existential anxieties of this sort have been relinquished to that class of academics usually referred to as jurisprudes or legal theorists. ‘Practicing’ international lawyers, so it is often argued, need not concern themselves with ‘theory’. Their mission is to provide tangible answers to practical problems and, for this task, ‘theoretical’ debate is irrelevant: its outcome is indeterminate, abstract, and, thus, of limited usability. In some cases ‘theoretical’ even becomes a pejorative term, synonymous with counter productive or parasitic.

On 22 November 1996, the Council of the European Union adopted a framework regulation and agreed to joint action to ‘protect’ the interests of the European Union and its citizens against the extraterritorial application of legislation by non-member states. These measures were adopted in response to the extraterritorial application of certain measures by the United States, concerning trade with and investment in Cuba, as well as investment in Iran and Libya. These United States measures apply to all natural and legal persons irrespective of their nationality, residency, or place of activity. Thus, even nationals of a member state of the European Union residing and active in the European Union must comply with the United States measures. The enactment of this legislation marks a new episode in the on-going battle between the United States and the European Union over the frontiers of a state's (or an international organization's) jurisdiction to prescribe. This time, however, the European Union counteracted by the adoption of measures which can partly be characterized as retorsion measures and partly as countermeasures. The adoption of these measures by the European Union raises questions with respect to the legitimacy of the retorsion measures and the legality of the countermeasures.

In its first issue of 1996, the Leiden Journal of International Law published an Editorial from the hands of René Lefeber and David Raič. In it, their main contention is that even if the Chechen people might not have had a right to external self-determination before December 1994, it acquired such a right due to Russia's massive and indiscriminate use of military force in December 1994. This right to external self-determination, so they claim, entails a (correlative?) right to secession.

The article discusses the two decisions (thus far) of the International Court of Justice in the case concerning Maritime Delimitation and Territorial Questions between Qatar and Bahrain, especially its consideration of when an internationally binding agreement has come into existence. The Court's willingness to infer a legally binding agreement, regardless of the intentions of at least one of the parties, appears to displace the primacy of consent it has emphasized in its earlier jurisprudence. The decision seems to hold states bound by informal commitments, an approach that might inhibit open negotiations between states and undermine genuine attempts to pre-empt disputes or to comply with the obligation of peaceful settlement of disputes.

The UN system requires far-reaching changes so as to achieve the objectives of the UN Charter (e.g. with regard to human rights and maintenance of peace) more effectively. European integration law suggests that ‘international constitutionalism’ offers the most effective approach for strengthening the rule of law and peaceful cooperation among democracies. Section 2 outlines basic principles for a constitutional theory of international law. Section 3 discusses the difficulties of ‘constitutionalizing’ the state-centered and power-oriented concepts of the UN Charter. Section 4 explains why the successful Uruguay Round strategy for replacing the old GATT 1947 by the new World Trade Organization (WTO) – notably the ‘package deal negotiations’, the incorporation of other worldwide treaties into WTO law and the mandatory WTO dispute settlement and enforcement systems – offer important lessons for the needed reforms of the UN Charter.

In recent years, there has been a continous attempt to describe changes in the possibilities for international action in relation to conflict situations. How does the coordination and management of international involvement in post-conflict situations contribute to a lasting peace? The article examines the principle texts associated with peace implementation in the former Yugoslavia, and extracts from these some of the elements of the coordination of multilateral activities. The article places this analysis in the context of past and current research on the question of the coordination of multilateral institutional activities as a first step in the grounded study of the organization and management of international involvement in securing peace in post-conflict situations.

Does the International Court of Justice have the power to indicate legally binding provisional measures? On the basis of the provisions of the UN Charter and the Statute of the International Court of Justice, it seems unlikely that the Court is bestowed with such a power. An alternative argument, which regards interim protection as a general principle of law, thus giving it binding force, is also not without difficulties. The situation seems to be clearer, however, when states declare in a treaty their intention to be bound by the provisional measures indicated by the Court. The argument considering provisional measures as a ‘moral obligation’ will be examined as well.

We agree with André de Hoogh that the Chechens did not possess a right to external self-determination prior to the massive indiscriminate use oi military force by Russia in December 1994. At no point have we argued or suggested otherwise. Hence, up to December 1994, the Chechen claim did indeed not meet the conditions set by paragraph seven of the Friendly Relations Declaration. However, the Friendly Relations Declaration needs to be interpreted in view of usus and opinio iuris. In other words, one has to analyse how this paragraph has developed in customary international law. According to our analysis of the law of self-determination, the emergence of a right to external self-determination depends on two cumulative conditions, viz. 1) the serious and persistent violation of the right to internal self-determination and 2) the exhaustion of all total and international peaceful remedies by the people concerned to effectuate its right to internal self-determination. These conditions must be deemed fulfilled if the parent state seriously and massively violates the fundamental human rights and freedoms – in particular by an arbitrary violation of the right to life – of the persons belonging to the people concerned.

The issue of whether an international judicial forum may entertain the claim of a dual national against a state to which he owes allegiance, is an old one. What is new, however, is the challenge by the Iran-United States Claims Tribunal of the traditionally held view that, in the absence of a clear mandate and where customary international law is exclusively invoked, the forum may not do so. Such a claim is admissible, says the Tribunal, provided the claimant is able to demonstrate: (a) that at all relevant times his “dominant and effective” nationality was the one on which he now relies; and (b) that the rights in question, those for the asserted breach of which he seeks redress, were not secured because of his other, non-dominant, nationality. Leaving for another day the questionability of the challenge, the present article offers to examine some of the more important aspects of the second test, as expounded and applied by the Tribunal.

On 1 July 1997 the People's Republic of China recovered Hong Kong in accordance with the Sino-British Joint Declaration of 19 December 1984. On the same day, China announced the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) formally established and functioning as of 1 July 1997.

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.

The CSCE/OSCE is linked in public opinion to one of the following headings: Helsinki Final Act and Cold War; arms control and disarmament; crisis management and conflict prevention. This picture is not completely incorrect in that it indicates more than 20 years of CSCE/OSCE history. Being no more than a series of conferences from 1973 to 1990, the ‘old’ CSCE attempted to bridge East and West, and it mainly contributed to developing military aspects of security in Europe. Following the collapse of the former Eastern bloc, the ‘new’ CSCE, later renamed the OSCE, was called upon to assist in managing the epochal change involving the resurgence of regional crises, and it has been equipped with a fully developed organizational and instrumental structure to that end. The most prominent examples of CSCE/OSCE activity in the areas of conflict prevention, crisis management, and post-conflict peacebuilding, are places such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chechnya, or Albania.

On 11 April 1997, the text of the Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses was presented by the Working Group of the Whole (WG) of the United Nations General Assembly Sixth Committee to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA). This Convention is based on the 1994 Draft Articles on the same topic prepared by the International Law Commission (ILC). These Draft Articles were approved on second reading by the ILC during its 46th session in 1994 and subsequently submitted to the 49th session of the UNGA in 1994 for consideration by states. By its Resolution 49/52, the UNGA invited states to present written submissions to comment on the Draft Articles and at the same time it proposed that a working group on the whole of the UNGA Sixth Committee be established to convene during the 51st session of UNGA (September-December 1996) to elaborate the text for a convention. During its first session, the WG did not manage to accomplish this task. The final text submitted to the UNGA on 11 April 1997 was the result of the second session of the WG which had deliberated during the period from 24 March to 4 April 1997.

Independence and impartiality of the judiciary is a conditio sine qua non for confidence in, and the authority and success of, any judicial procedure. This article takes a close look at the voting patterns of the judges of two influential international tribunals: the International Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights. To what extent do national judges (and judges ad hoc, in particular) vote consistently with the position of their national governments? By conducting a factual analysis of the voting behaviour of the judges, the present paper aims at drawing some tentative conclusions on the fulfilment of the requirements of independence and impartiality in the operation of these two distinguished courts. Of all influences to which men are subject, none is more powerful, more persvasive or more subtle than the tie of allegiance that binds them [judges] to the land of their homes and kindred and to the great sources of the honors and preferments for which they are so ready to spend their fortunes and to risk their lives.

Traditionally, most arbitration acts provided that an arbitrator could be challenged on the same grounds as those on which judges could be challenged. Thus, arbitrators could be challenged on specific grounds, such as a family relationship with one of the parties or animosity towards one of the parties. The more modern approach is to provide for an open norm for the grounds on which challenges can be brought. This approach finds its origin in the UNCITRAL Arbitration Rules adopted in 1976. It provides that: “[a]n arbitrator may be challenged only if circumstances exist that give rise to the justifiable doubts as to his impartiality or independence”. This standard was received in many other arbitration acts and rules. The standard nowadays being more or less uniform, its interpretation and application are far from easy.

The European Social Charter (ESC) was signed in 1961 and has been in force since 1965. Protecting 19 fundamental rights, it was conceived as the counterpart, in the field of social and economic rights, to the European Convention on Human Rights. However, it was considered to have several shortcomings as a human right instrument, namely a slow, confusing and government-controlled monitoring mechanism as well as a list of protected rights that was incomplete. This last criticism was partly met by the Additional Protocol to the Charter of 1988, which guaranteed four additional rights. However, an informal Ministerial Conference on Human Rights held in Rome on 5 November 1990 acknowledged that one had to go further. The ministers invited the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to take the necessary steps for a detailed study of the role, content, and operation of the European Social Charter with a view to giving it a new impetus. In response, the Committee of Ministers authorized the convening of an ad hoc committee, the Committee on the European Social Charter (the so-called “Charte-Rel Committee”). It was instructed to make proposals for improving the effectiveness of the Charter and, in particular, the functioning of its supervisory machinery. In carrying out its task, the Committee consulted the international representatives of management and labour, including the European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and the Union of the Confederations of Industry and Employers of Europe (UNICE), as well as the International Labour Organization (ILO) at all stage.

International administrative law deals with legal recourse within public international organizations in respect of conflicts between employees (international civil servants) and the organization itself. Literature in this field of public international law is relatively scarce and jurisprudence is not easily accessible. Following a short survey of the main particulars in international administrative law this article will present a recent case in which the Appeals Board of the European Space Agency (ESA) rendered a decision. It deals with some typical legal issues which play a role in international administrative procedures. For practitioners, in particular, this case is an interesting example, of how international tribunals solve legal questions in respect of jurisdiction and substance.

The parties jointly notified the Court on 2 July 1993 of a Special Agreement by which they submitted to it for adjudication the differences between them concerning the Gabčíkovo-Nagymaros Project. By an Order of 14 July 1993, the Court fixed 2 May 1994 as the time-limit for the filing by each of the parties of a Memorial and 5 December 1994 for the filing by each of the parties of a Counter-Memorial. By Order of 20 December 1994, the President of the Court fixed 20 June 1995 as the time-limit for the filing of a Reply by each of the Parties.

While conflict management is an important part of any international treaty, it is particularly important in the case of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which will enter into force on 29 April 1997. Disarmament is the primary goal of the Convention and, therefore, by definition, it will encroach on the sovereignty and security interests of its state-parties. Negotiated by the Geneva-based Conference on Disarmament over more than 20 years, the Treaty was finally approved by that body in September 1992 and endorsed by the UN General Assembly in December of that year. The Convention's provisions reflect the new world into which it was born. The regime established by the Convention to verify compliance with its terms is unprecedented in terms of its scope and depth, and because state-parties will have no right to refuse verification activities specified in the Convention. It is also unprecedented in that all state-parties are treated equally, unlike some other multilateral regimes related to the control of weapons of mass destruction negotiated earlier. Nonetheless, such an extensive regime, made possible by the politics of a post-Cold-War world, will inevitably encounter unexpected complications and unforeseen difficulties. This will be so particularly with respect to compliance and interpreting the results of verification activities; therefore, the provisions in the Convention for managing potential or actual conflict will be cruical for it to operate effectively.