A crucial aspect of international law is to provide long-term stability and legal certainty. This function presumes that international law-making creates discrete norms and institutions that remain static until they are changed (or replaced) by other discrete institutions. This paper adopts a different point of departure to think about ‘temporariness’. It suggests a dynamic of norm creation and institutional change in global governance. Neither norms nor institutions remain static once they become ‘permanent’. They adapt, evolve and transform. This contribution argues that this process of change is driven by interaction among institutions and actors, which is the default technology of post-national rule-making. How to start thinking about such interaction? What is the added value of focusing on the process of interaction and not on the allegedly static characteristics of actors themselves? How can this approach provide a different normative and critical framework to think about debates on global governance? In answering these questions, this chapter will explore the interaction between international institutions in order to develop the central tenets of a methodology to think about institutional change in post-national rule-making.

On 18 September 2013, a team of Greenpeace activists attempted to board the Prirazlomnaya oil platform, situated within the Russian exclusive economic zone, intending to disrupt drilling activities and raise awareness of Arctic environmental issues. This action resulted in the subsequent arrest of 30 individuals associated with the protest, as well as that of the Arctic Sunrise, a Greenpeace support vessel sailing under the Dutch flag. The plight of the so-called ‘Arctic 30’ dominated global headlines until their release under a general amnesty by Russia in December 2013. Meanwhile, the arrest of the vessel prompted the commencement of arbitral proceedings by the Netherlands against Russia, a process that had yet to be concluded at the time of writing. In November 2013, however, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea upheld a Dutch petition for provisional measures, including the release of the vessel and its crew subject to the payment of a bond. In so doing, the Tribunal faced the issue of non-participation by a respondent state for the first time, while also developing arguably a ‘back-door’ position on prompt release. In the meantime, aspects of the legality of environmental activism at sea remain somewhat uncertain which, given that a considerable number of protest vessels are registered to the Netherlands, may engage the litigative attention of the Dutch authorities in future incidents.

This article analyzes the Iraq inquiry in The Netherlands as presented by the Davids Committee (Rapport Commissie van onderzoek besluitvorming Irak. Boom, Amsterdam, 2010). It discusses the so-called corpus theory that informed the Dutch position that the invasion in Iraq was in accordance with international law, and its deconstruction by the Davids Committee. However, this article also argues that the corpus theory was only part of the story. In the search for justifying its political support of the war, the corpus theory interacted with two other claims for legitimacy put forward by the Dutch government. These alternative strands of legitimacy moved beyond positive law to include extra-Charter values (notably with regard to state roguery in the New World Order) on the one hand, and to circumvent the politics within the Security Council (legitimacy through defiance), on the other hand. The analysis discloses how any legal argumentation and bids for legitimacy are based on a particular vision of the international society and how to safeguard law, peace, and freedom in the contemporary international order. Together this leads to a more nuanced view, which does not alter the conclusion that the Iraq war was illegal, but which does show that it can be deceptive to reduce international policy-making to a zero-sum choice between law and politics narrowly defined.

The end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s have witnessed a considerable shift in managing trade relations on an interstate level. The first and most striking event is obviously the GATT Uruguay Round. The prolonged negotiations, culminating in the ‘Brussels breakdown’ in December 1990, have shown a large degree of disagreement among the trading powers as to the extent and content of substantive international trade rights and obligations.

Since 1945, international criminal justice has been one continuous construction site, an expression of the attitude of international stakeholders and policymakers that favours temporary solutions to contemporary problems. Even with the creation of the ICC that has not really changed. This chapter will set out a few fundamental and rather radical ideas that aim at initiating a thorough rethinking of the way criminal proceedings at the international level are regulated and run today. It sees itself very much as a call for a principled re-evaluation and for a move away from the attempts of the last two decades of arriving at a genuine amalgam of diverse systems by the method of judicial trial and error. The existing model(s) is/are an exemplary expression of the temporariness of international law, because it/they proceed(s) from a refusal by international law-makers to engage in drafting a permanent model that retains fairness standards while striving for maximum efficiency and that is meant to be applied across the board to any (new) tribunal—an approach that would lead to much greater certainty of law than is currently the case because of an increase in cross-institutional comparability. The chapter contends that while both adversarial and judge-led systems in their own national settings can achieve comparable levels of fairness, they differ in efficiency and that a judge-led model is better suited for the international arena and should be made the foundation for any future permanent procedural framework. However, the temporary nature of the present system which mainly uses adversarial models is based to a large extent on an unprincipled reliance on supposedly ‘ready-made’ and ‘tried and tested’ solutions from as well as the experience of staff employed at previous tribunals. The use of the adversarial model is thus not based on a principled evaluation of its usefulness and effectiveness in the international context but on a default attitude of the lawyers creating and populating international tribunals, and possibly the diplomatic community in the wider sense.

One of the most interesting regulations to appear in the 1979 volume of the Official Journal of the European Communities was Council Regulation (EEC) No. 954/79 of 15 May 1979 concerning the ratification by Member States of, or their accession to, the United Nations Convention on a Code of Conduct for Liner Conferences.

The Rhine is governed by an international regime. This dates back to 1804 when the Patent Treaty was signed between France and the German Empire. It contained the first rules relating to the abolition of the many local tolls and regulations and assigned responsibility for shipping and tasks related to this activity to a central organ. This process of internationalization was not abandoned during the Congress of Vienna. The Central Commission for Navigation on the Rhine, consisting of delegates from the riparian States, was set up in 1815 and was commissioned to draw up a new set of international rules on the basis of guidelines established by the Congress. The principle that navigation on the Rhine ‘sous le rapport du commerce’ [commercial shipping] should not be prohibited to anyone was a fundamental assumption in Vienna. Apart from this freedom of shipping — both in an economic and in a nautical sense — the aim was to abolish, or at least restrict, national tolls, duties and taxes, and to introduce a uniform approach in the traffic regulations applicable to the Rhine.

The permanent legal framework governing international organisations vests organisations with a substantial degree of autonomy in determining their own liability with respect to private law claims. This level of autonomy is particularly pronounced in the case of the United Nations. Since 1946, the United Nations has enjoyed a standard of absolute immunity from the jurisdiction of domestic courts in order to protect the organisation’s proper functioning. Thus, when individuals have private law claims against the organisation, the UN is obliged to settle claims privately, and individuals have no further recourse to courts. This regime creates a startling accountability gap, most recently highlighted by the UN’s handling of 5000 private law claims which emerged in response to the allegedly negligent importation of cholera into Haiti by UN peacekeepers. To date, the UN has refused to settle these claims amicably. The UN’s jurisdictional immunity now operates as a critical barrier to redress for the cholera claimants. This remedial deficit represents a structural gap which is indefensible in light of a shifting paradigm in international law, which increasingly favours human rights and respect for the rule of law over the autonomy of international organisations. This article examines both permanent and temporary solutions to closing this accountability gap, which could potentially alleviate the intractable position faced by the cholera claimants and similar victims in the future.

Although this sets out to be an annual survey, it may also include material which dates from a different parliamentary year from that given in the heading. This has proved to be inevitable in those cases when texts do not become available to the editor until long after their original date of drafting; written submissions to international organizations made by the Netherlands representatives frequently fall into this category.

Most of the information is derived from the Reports of Parliament which are available in Dutch on <www.overheid.nl/op/index.html>. The Yearbook surveys are also available in a consolidated way in a database on <www.asser.nl/pil/index.htm>.

This survey covers the treaties, international agreements, and other international instruments mentioned in the ‘Tractatenblad van het Koninkrijk der Nederlanden’ – Treaty Series of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (abbr.: Trb.). Its purpose is to record the legal consequences of such agreements and instruments for the Netherlands, and Netherlands State acts in respect of them, such as signature, parliamentary approval, ratification, entry into force, provisional application, extension or limitation of territorial application, termination and abrogation. Signature by the Netherlands, however, is mentioned separately only if, in the case of multilateral treaties, such signature has taken place on a date different from the official date of conclusion of the treaty.

The war on Iraq has fuelled the debate about the nature and meaning of the international security system premised on the United Nations. This paper begins by examining the nature and subsequent modification of the UN collective security system. It focuses on the practice of Security Council authorisations to use force and the expanded notion of self-defence. It identifies as causes of such transformation the changing security environment, power asymmetries and the structural inability of the UN to adapt accordingly. The paper examines the failings of such a system and concludes by offering a framework for an international security system based on legitimacy interpreted as the congruence between processes, actors, claims and practices.

When democracies wage war, they ‘know’ that they have the law on their side. The same holds true when they condemn war. But what if democracies take divergent legal positions to one and the same war? Relying on governmental and public ‘Iraq’ discourses in the United States and Germany, this article argues that governments can no longer define the law in isolation from their societal environments. The critical relation of ‘politics,’ ‘law,’ and ‘democracy’ is increasingly established not only in the political centers of states but also in the periphery: in the public discourse. This discursive process of international law becoming ‘public’ cannot be ignored. However, the patterns of meaning of international law vary remarkably. While there is public politics of international law in democracies, a per se ‘democratic’ politics of international law is hardly recognizable.

Questions of international law arising in connection with the “Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Free Trade Association” (Carifta); when Carifta Territories seek to conclude an association agreement in particular, questions of capacity considered in the light of the dependency of the majority of Carifta Territories (section 2), in the light of Articles 30—Relations with International Organizations— and 32(2) —Association— (section 3), and in connection with the existence of a Commonwealth Caribbean Heads of Government Conference (section 4).

On 10 December 1979 the Governing Board of the International Energy Agency (IEA) met in Paris at ministerial level. The subject of discussion was the action to be taken to meet problems in the field of oil supply, and the implementation of the “Declaration” by the Western Summit Conference in Tokyo on this matter. On the basis of the decisions adopted during this meeting, which established, inter alia, individually identifiable oil-import ceilings, it has been remarked that the IEA had arrived at a “turning-point”. “After five years of, more or less global, non-binding arrangements, 1980 is the year in which it will have to be shown whether one can indeed arrive at a clear, more obligatory approach to the oil problem”. Whatever future developments there might be, this seems to be a good time to take a closer look at the IEA. The current war between Iraq and Iran, also re-emphasises the vulnerability of Western oil-supplies, and underlines the practical importance of the IEA. This article will deal mainly with some of the remarkable institutional aspects of the Agency, and the International Energy Program (IEP) which it manages. Before this, there will be a discussion of the background of the IEA and a short description of the core of the IEP: the crisis mechanism, and the other objectives. The article will be concluded with some observations on the relationship between the IEA and the European Communities (EC).

According to the author, the answer to the question raised above is that neither a pure nor a semi-presidential system is to be recommended but rather a strong parliamentary system with an executive, the European Commission, whose democratic legitimacy is rooted in citizen involvement through parliamentary elections organized on the basis of political platforms presented by Euro-parties centred around well defined divisive issues. That would make the executive fully answerable towards the universally elected Parliament. In such a constellation, the accountability of the Council of Ministers should, as long as it remains the most prominent part of the Union legislature, be strengthened through devices such as transparency, mutual accountability between the Council and Parliament, and codes of ethics outlining the duties and responsibilities of individual Council members. As for the European Council, it should not be allowed to take over legislative or executive responsibilities but should continue to fulfil its role of driving the Union forward politically.

Iraq and Iran would certainly not come at the top of everyone's list of States which are particularly concerned with the implementation of international law. However, as is the case in virtually all international conflicts, to justify their actions in the Gulf War, these States have also adopted positions based on arguments of international law. In a complicated conflict such as this, it is by no means easy to assess the validity of such justifications, as this contribution attempts to do, if only because the facts are extremely difficult to determine objectively. For purposes of international law, this problem regarding the facts can be partially avoided by analysing the conflict mainly on the basis of the viewpoints raised during the discussions of the conflict in the Security Council and the General Assembly of the United Nations. Moreover, only the first stage of the conflict up to 1980 is examined here.