There is a broad political consensus that states must not facilitate money laundering, especially as relates to the proceeds of foreign grand corruption. Over the past 30 years, an elaborate regulatory regime has been put in place in most countries to ensure that proceeds of crime are interdicted and confiscated. It rests on the technically non-binding recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, an influential intergovernmental grouping. Despite this progress and the adoption of international treaties against corruption and organized crime, international law contains no express treaty rule that enjoins states from facilitating money laundering. Furthermore, there are formidable legal and practical obstacles to invoking international legal responsibility of states that do choose to benefit from enabling money laundering. This article explores the disconnect between international law as it stands and the widely accepted political imperative that states must not facilitate money laundering. It argues in favour of recognizing a self-standing customary rule to that effect, and outlines the content and likely impact of such a rule.

The long-simmering process of sidelining and side-stepping migrants’ rights protection while attempting to regulate cross-border movement of people was heated up by the 2015 migration crisis and has recently been brought to the boil with the crisis-fuelled adoption of the UN Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration (GCM) in 2018. The GCM represents an endorsement at the international level of soft-law, goal-setting frameworks for international co-operation on migration as it pertains to migrants’ rights, and a corresponding disavowal of any role for binding legal obligations in this field. Focusing on the EU, I argue in this article that states’ sovereign powers in the realm of control of non-EU migration have been largely undiluted by the development of the international system of human rights protection. I show how the 2015 migration crisis galvanized multilateral international co-operation on the part of the EU and its member states in the field of non-EU migration in a way that entrenched EU states’ sovereign self-interest by institutionalizing a soft-law approach, thereby producing a crisis from the perspective of migrants’ rights protection. I also argue, however, that the migration crisis facilitated a resurgence of state sovereignty in the EU to the detriment not only of migrants’ rights, but also of internal EU co-operation and co-ordination. Finally, I suggest that in times of crisis supranational courts are particularly susceptible to being recruited to EU states’ rights-restrictive approach to international migration.

This article assesses the implications of national climate litigation for what is termed ‘the international rule of law’. Starting from the finding that the current international climate treaty regime lacks several elements of an international rule of law, such as legal bindingness, clarity, and justiciability, the author explores what national courts contribute to filling these gaps. Deviating from a linear progression narrative, which is prevalent in existing literature, this article provides a more nuanced and complex picture. Whereas successful climate litigation is hardly imaginable without reliance on internationally agreed-upon facts – such as reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and global average temperature levels deemed ‘dangerous’ – doctrinally decisions do not represent a turn toward a stricter rule of international climate law. Instead of applying and progressively developing climate treaties, courts thus far have primarily used these provisions only to develop national constitutional law and regional human rights law. The created system of highly contextual national rule(s) of climate law is a fragmented one which is regionally limited to a few states predominantly located in Western Europe. Consequently, it is a far cry from a truly global rule of international climate law.

The EUNAVFOR MED anti-smuggling mission, Operation Sophia, ended in March 2020 and is largely viewed to have failed in its objective of ‘disrupting the business model’ of migrant smugglers in the Mediterranean region. The mission relied on purported enforcement powers in the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea and the 2000 Migrant Smuggling Protocol to seize and destroy stateless smuggling vessels on the high seas. Despite repeated claims to such powers by the European Union, neither treaty provides a strong jurisdictional basis for seizing stateless smuggling vessels outside territorial waters. However, ambiguous drafting in the Migrant Smuggling Protocol viably permits some claims to extraterritorial enforcement jurisdiction over stateless smuggling vessels on the high seas, and the European Union has relied on this ambiguity to tackle migrant smuggling. This article argues that the recent European Union anti-smuggling operations, most notably Operation Sophia, have reinterpreted the ambiguous term ‘appropriate measures’ in the Migrant Smuggling Protocol as permitting the states parties to exercise enforcement jurisdiction over stateless smuggling vessels at sea.

This article explores the conditions and modalities under which a state can incur responsibility in relation to violations of international law involving military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. While the question of how to attribute and allocate responsibility for wrongful conduct is one of the central contemporary challenges of AI, the perspective of state responsibility under international law remains relatively underexplored. Moreover, most scholarly and policy debates have focused on questions raised by autonomous weapons systems (AWS), without paying significant attention to issues raised by other potential applications of AI in the military domain. This article provides a comprehensive analysis of state responsibility in relation to military AI. It discusses state responsibility for the wrongful use of AI-enabled military technologies and the question of attribution of conduct, as well as state responsibility prior to deployment, for failure to ensure compliance of AI systems with international law at the stages of development or acquisition. Further, it analyses derived state responsibility, which may arise in relation to the conduct of other states or private actors.

The article scrutinizes some of the surprising commonalities in the reasonings of two recent decisions by two separate judicial forums: the ITLOS’s judgment in the M/V Norstar case and the award of an ad hoc arbitral tribunal in the Enrica Lexie case. One key connection between the two decisions is their heavy reliance on the Lotus judgment of the PCIJ. Another similarity between the two disputes is that both of them revolve around the concept of exclusive flag state jurisdiction under UNCLOS Article 92(1) and adjacent questions of jurisdiction on the high seas. The article is going to subject both decisions to criticism and argue that some of the more problematic positions adopted by the tribunals in both cases amount to no more than obiter dicta – thus establishing an additional parallel with Lotus, which also received heavy criticism for its controversial obiter dictum. The two tribunals’ new-found interest in Lotus also provides an opportunity to discuss the utility and legal weight of Lotus as a precedent in the face of a century of developments in treaty law and judicial practice. In this sense, this article builds on and attempts to continue the recent trend in scholarship advocating for a renewed appreciation of the Lotus case against the backdrop of decades of criticism against it. Accordingly, the article aims to facilitate a better understanding of all three disputes, the principles they applied, and the dynamics of international adjudication and international law in general.

We introduce this symposium of articles by explaining the notions of hard and soft law, and reviewing UN developments on business and human rights in this light. We move to a more detailed discussion of existing hard law, particularly the state duty to protect, before examining examples of fulfilment of that duty via the domestication (especially the judicialization) of human rights norms for business. We also note the many pitfalls in contemporary approaches, before examining how the proposed legally binding instrument might address those pitfalls. We conclude with commentary on how soft and hard norms to date have failed to grapple with corporate power, the issue which animates the need for a business human rights debate in the first place, before introducing the articles to follow.

The international investment and tax law regimes are undergoing a process of significant reforms that seek to address existing shortcomings of the mechanisms used for the resolution of investment and tax treaty disputes. These reforms show that policymakers are gradually adopting a fragmented approach towards dispute settlement in both fields, with the establishment of different and unco-ordinated mechanisms. This article argues that, instead of fragmenting investment and tax dispute settlement, states should consider establishing a more unified and coherent framework in order to more adequately mitigate the concerns raised in each field.

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.

Unlike its European counterparts, Canada appears to remain firmly entrenched in a soft approach to ensuring that Canadian extractive companies respect human rights abroad. Canada’s powerful extractive industry has been very successful in resisting attempts to introduce hard law measures to regulate their transnational conduct. This article considers business and state motivations for supporting or pursuing the shift to hard law measures in the business and human rights context. It assesses Canada’s 2022 policy on responsible business conduct and the implications of the government’s failure to endow the Canadian Ombudsperson for Responsible Enterprise with the necessary powers to engage in credible independent investigations of transnational business conduct. It also considers the potential impact of three leading cases brought in Canadian courts against Canadian extractive companies in relation to their overseas operations. The article argues that these developments may not yet be sufficient on their own to shift extractive sector views on the introduction of domestic human rights due diligence legislation. It concludes with some thoughts on the impact that the legislative developments in Europe and treaty negotiations at the United Nations may have in Canada.

Shi Jiuyong was an eminent Chinese international lawyer who became the first Chinese national to helm the International Court of Justice. This tribute examines Shi’s underexplored university education years, illuminating how these early experiences proved formative in his subsequent years as an international law practitioner, scholar and judge. In doing so, this tribute explores the factors that animated Shi’s choices and focuses, giving context to his slew of admirable achievements later in life.

This article examines COVAX, a public private partnership, from a public law perspective. It asks whether COVAX is a legitimate and appropriate instrument with regard to the goal of distributing COVID-19 vaccines in a globally equitable manner and enabling equal access to vaccination worldwide. By developing public-legal legitimacy standards for this purpose, the article critically distances itself from the outset from considering the use of private actors and forms of action in public functions (‘privatization’) essentially as a release of market economy rationality, which enables efficiency and effectiveness gains and relieves the public sector. With the public law perspective, the article questions precisely whether private-law, market-based action is appropriate with respect to the global distribution of vaccines in the pandemic.

This article examines the precedential value of Russia’s ‘special military operation’ against Ukraine in February 2022 for the purpose of interpreting the rules of jus contra bellum. Following the methodology set down by the ICJ in its Nicaragua judgment, self-defence is identified as the legal basis explicitly invoked by Russia in order to justify its operation in Ukraine. The authors then examine closely the reactions by third states with respect to the legality of Russia’s military operation and establish that the legal arguments put forth by Russia – including, more specifically, an innovative reading of the right to self-defence of entities unilaterally recognized as states – have been overwhelmingly rejected by third states. On that basis, the authors conclude that this precedent does not challenge the established understanding of the prohibition to use force in international relations and of its exceptions.

Mandatory human rights due diligence (HRDD) laws in the European Union (EU) – both enacted and in the making – seem to be a promising tool to harden soft international standards in the business and human rights (BHR) field, the most prominent of these being the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGPs). This article develops a two-layered critique of mandatory HRDD laws. It problematizes the very concept of HRDD as articulated by the UNGPs. I will argue that due to various conceptual, operational and structural limitations, HRDD alone will not bring the desired changes for rightsholders, because this process does not address various asymmetries of power between corporations and affected communities. The second layer of critique concerns the content of mandatory HRDD laws enacted in France, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Germany. Assessing these laws vis-à-vis six preconditions required to protect effectively people and the planet from business-related harms, it is clear that these mandatory HRDD laws are half-hearted attempts to tame business-related human rights abuses and hold the relevant corporate actors accountable. In addition to developing more ambitious mandatory HRDD laws in future, states should employ a range of additional regulatory tools that pay greater attention to achieving outcomes, drawing red lines in certain situations, and promoting access to remedy and corporate accountability.

In its jurisprudence, the ICJ has developed a hierarchy of sources it will rely on to resolve territorial disputes: it prioritizes a boundary treaty between the state litigants, followed by agreements between the states’ colonial predecessors, and finally state litigants’ actions displaying their authority over the disputed territory. The Court’s practice therefore leaves no room for local populations to contribute to boundary-making decisions. Given the status self-determination holds in international law today, and the repercussions possibly faced by such populations in certain territorial disputes, there is cause to consider that the desires of local populations should be considered in the Court’s legal reasoning. This article first unpacks the reasons that self-determination is not brought up by state litigants on one hand, nor by the Court on the other hand. It notes that self-determination is only rhetorically addressed by states if buttressing their interests. It therefore attempts to reconcile self-determination with territorial disputes, suggesting how peoples’ desires may be factored into the Court’s approach.

In an attempt to reassert the relevance of international human rights law in contemporary urban contexts, this article considers the extent to which the provisions of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights lend themselves to fruitful application in African cities, appropriation by African cities and the development of rights to African cities. The article ultimately argues that, despite the rural inclinations of its drafting context, certain textual shortcomings and the existence of major political hurdles to its effective implementation, the African Charter, as interpreted and applied by the African Commission and African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, is well-placed for the regional human rights system’s adaptation to the urban age.

This article considers the international laws applicable to irresponsible state behaviour in cyberspace through the lens of the problem of election hacking. The rule of sovereignty has taken centre stage in these discussions and is said to be preferred to the non-intervention rule because it evades the problem of coercion. Proponents of the cyber rule of sovereignty contend that there is such a rule; opponents reject the existence of the rule as a matter of existing law. The objective here is to explore the methodologies involved in the identification of the cyber rule of sovereignty under customary international law. The work first frames the debate in the language of regulative and constitutive rules, allowing us to show that a regulative rule of sovereignty can, logically, and necessarily, be deduced from the constitutive rule of sovereignty. The content of the regulative rule can also be deduced from the constitutive rule of sovereignty, but it has a more limited scope than claimed by the proponents of the rule, notably the Tallinn Manual 2.0. The rule of sovereignty prohibits state cyber operations carried out on the territory of the target state and remote cyber operations which involve the exercise of sovereign authority on that territory, e.g., police evidence-gathering operations. The rule of sovereignty does not, however, prohibit other remote, ex situ state cyber operations, even those targeting ICTs used for governmental functions, including the conduct of elections. The rule of sovereignty is not, then, the solution to the problem of election hacking.

Human rights violations by corporations are widespread and have a broad spectrum: damage to people’s health through pollution, environmental accidents and health and safety failures, forced labour or child labour, underpaid workers, displaced communities, contaminated water sources, use of excessive force, and discrimination, for example by race, gender or sexuality. Corporate violence, resulting from a long history of corporate power and colonialism continues today as corporations have grown into powerful global conglomerates. Through complex and opaque multinational groups and supply chains, use of corporate law concepts such as the corporate veil, as well as other actions such as tax avoidance and lobbying of national and international political institutions, corporate actors remain free to pursue their goals. Despite efforts to combat corporate harm through the development of a business and human rights movement success has been limited and significant gaps remain in the global governance required to ensure protection. This article argues that, similar to a cat and mouse game, corporations find new ways to defend themselves against those seeking to dismantle their power or to prevent human rights infringements. The problem is rooted in structural and systemic inequalities within the international legal framework and in company laws that maintain corporate structures that obstruct the human rights movement’s progress. The current drive towards a more sustainable business agenda requires a just transition, including transformation of global and corporate structures to tackle human rights violations and the inequalities of power and wealth that facilitate such violations.

What is striking about recent scholarship on the application of customary international law to cyber activities is how little has been dedicated to the preliminary question of how one identifies the applicability of existing rules of customary international law to cyber operations. Yet, the answer to this preliminary question holds the key to answering many of the questions which arise regarding whether existing rules of customary international law apply to cyber activities. This article seeks to answer the preliminary question. After providing background on the nature of customary international law, and in light of recent scholarly trends and what is often implied in literature on cyber activities, it makes the argument that rules of customary international law are not interpretable. Accordingly, reference must be made to state practice accepted as law for the purpose of identifying applicable customary international law; the article provides guidance on how this should be done. For a precedent of state practice to be relevant to determining the existence of a customary rule applicable to a cyber activity, pursuant to the International Court’s jurisprudence, the precedent must not have significant distinguishing features from the cyber activity concerned. For determining whether a precedent of opinio juris recognizes the existence of a customary rule applicable to the cyber activity, it is necessary to determine whether the relevant state pronouncement intended to accept as law a rule applicable thereto. In anticipation of objections, the article also addresses the practicability of the approach laid out.