Can international law help to maintain peace? If so, which areas of international law are relevant to the problem of war and peace? For a long time international law merely recorded that there was a distinction between the law of peace and the law of war, jus pacis and jus belli, a distinction based on the fact that there was a substantial difference between friend and foe, and that the enemy relationship could be one of life and death. This is typical of an underdeveloped legal community. The national legal order no longer recognizes the enemy relationship in the national context. This relationship only fits into a structure lacking central authority and central power. Such as a structure of sovereign States which determine their own way of life and are responsible for their own security. A structure of this kind is a polemogenous one in which the power struggle is considered the ultima ratio. The price of national sovereignty is occasionally war, The price of lasting peace will inter alia be interference with unlimited national sovereignty, restriction of the individual country's freedom of decision in matters concerning armaments, economic structure, ideology and culture, environmental protection and national law.

The government has the duty to promote the development of the international legal order, says Article 90 of the Netherlands Constitution. Although somewhat similar provisions occur in other constitutions, only the draft Constitution of the European Union contains an identical provision. This essay analyses the precise meaning of the constitutional duty in the Netherlands. It traces the history of the relevant provision and sketches how it developed from a provision on the use of peaceful means for settling international disputes into a general provision on the duty to promote the development of the international legal order. The meaning and content of the duty contained in this provision is distinguished by analysing the overlapping twin notions of abidance by versus promotion of international law, of international society and the international legal order, of serving international and the national interest, and by discussing the attributive versus the regulative nature of Article 90 of the Constitution. The case-law on this provision is discussed separately, and describes the development from reviewing the compatibility of state action with public international law to considering it a programmatic provision with limited justiciability.

In its dynamic function, focussing on promoting the development of an international legal order, the provision has a critical, exhortatory function; it does not regard actual facts, but is about desirable futures. It should foster discourse about the structural weaknesses in the present political and legal international order and should highlight the discussion on whether certain policy choices actually promote the latter's development.

In the Netherlands, the law of state immunity form execution covers an area where statutory provisions are scarce, where the judiciary has only sporadically entered and which has largely been neglected by scholarly opinion. So, when it comes to rendering an account of Dutch law concerning state immunity from execution, there is very little to draw upon. Even the notions of execution and of state immunity appearing in the title of this paper lack so much clarity that starting from a definition of these notions would hardly serve to project a clear image of what the law of state immunity from execution amounts to in the Netherlands.

At the present time there is no rule of law governing the question of immunity from jurisdiction and from execution in Switzerland. When the Federal Law on actions for debts and bankruptcy was being amended in 1949, the legislator had declined to legislate on this point.

The United Nations General Assembly is faced with a draft declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, the product of a quarter of a century of international negotiations where indigenous peoples played an important but informal role through the Working Group on Indigenous Peoples of the UN Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities. After more than a decade of haggling in the UN Commission on Human Rights, the new Human Rights Council adopted the draft Declaration in June 2006 and forwarded it to the General Assembly for final approval. Unexpectedly, the Third Committee of the Assembly deferred its adoption. The future of the declaration is now in some doubt.

This article presents and discusses these developments, which started around 1980 and culminated with the adoption of the draft at the level of the Human Rights Council in 2006. It examines the standard-setting efforts and international jurisprudence during that period, noting that the growing awareness of the situation of indigenous peoples has led to significant legal developments at the national and international level, but that the implementation of the new legal standards is lagging seriously behind. Next, the article examines in depth the content and the controversial issues of the draft declaration, followed by an examination of the intended or potential institutional and procedural safeguards for these rights. It also examines a draft Nordic Saami convention which may become a model for the future. The concluding remarks review the achievements made over the last quarter of a century, and the prospects for amendments that may be required to achieve the final adoption of the Declaration by the General Assembly.

The purpose of this Article is to review international environmental law as, in a certain sense, a special field of international law. In doing this, it is not the intention to argue, or even imply, that international environmental law constitutes in some way a special branch or regime separate from the mainstream of traditional or classical international law. Rather, what we will be doing is to look, firstly, at certain ways in which special features of the environment as a subject matter of international law have resulted in particular solutions, applications or rules within the general principles of international law which, if not necessarily unique to, are at least particularly characteristic of, environmental law. Secondly, we shall see, however, that the attempt to provide a necessary legal framework to meet the problems of the environment, both alone and in relation to other perceived problems of the modern world, are stretching and possibly straining the limits of classical international law. The result is that international environmental law is at present also characterised by the rise of novel theories, many of which are not universally accepted, but which may, neverthless be very influential in the whole field, political, legal and scientific, of environmental protection.

European integration has been portrayed as an example of the juridification of cosmopolitan values and the constitutionalization of cosmopolitan law. Yet, is the EU really a successful case of cosmopolitan constitution-building? Moreover, can cosmopolitanism itself provide a way out of the current dilemmas of the EU as occasionally seems to be suggested? In seeking an answer to these questions, first of all the roots of and contemporary rationale for moral and legal cosmopolitanism are explored from a normative point of view. What emerges from this is that the juridification of cosmopolitan values, such as universal human rights standards, together with the increasing loss of power of states resulting from globalization have raised concerns about the democratic legitimacy and accountability of the current global legal order. Democratic states are believed to no longer function properly given the non-democratic nature of the current global legal environment. Demands for the establishment of a (different) global legal order which constitutes, attributes and demarcates public power effectively amount to an appeal for the constitutionalization of cosmopolitan law. From an analysis of the relevant literature the allocation of power, the provision of democratic legitimacy and accountability, and the establishment of a political community beyond the state, are identified as the main challenges that any viable model for the constitutionalization of cosmopolitan law has to address. Applying these key issues as a theoretical framework for the analysis of the multidimensional constitutional legal order of the EU, it can be observed that while the EU undoubtedly signifies the most advanced form of governance beyond the state, it can neither unreservedly be considered to constitute a cosmopolitan project, nor does it offer a convenient model for the establishment of a democratic global legal order. At the same time, given the many uncertainties governing its concrete shape, legal cosmopolitanism also does not offer ready-made solutions for the structural, constitutional and institutional challenges which the EU currently faces.

This paper explores some of the major changes in the practices of international organizations that have occurred in the decades since The Doctrine of the Legal Equality of States was published. First, much international law-making in contemporary international organizations consists of regulation and administration whose creation, content and application differs significantly from that of traditional forms of international legislation associated with international organizations. Second, in a highly fragmented international legal order, twenty-first century international organizations increasingly interact with each other in a wide variety of law-making and operational capacities. Given these changing roles and activities, it is no longer sufficient to view international organizations primarily as fora through which other actors – typically states – pursue their interests. Rather, twenty-first century international organizations often pursue their own goals and agendas as autonomous actors in international affairs. These developments have rendered traditional debates over sovereign equality within international organizations substantially less salient than they were when Legal Equality was written. In the future, the cutting-edge doctrinal and jurisprudential issues raised by twenty-first century international organizations largely will arise out of interactions among international organizations. As a result, legal scholars should shift their attention from inter-state interactions and processes within any particular IO to interactions and processes among twenty-first century IOs. Of course, decentering sovereign equality does not mean that the international system should celebrate or enshrine legal inequality. Rather, the international community should develop other concepts that incorporate the notions of inclusiveness and egalitarianism associated with sovereign equality, but that are more applicable to the actions of twenty-first century IOs.

Writing in 1964, Pieter Kooijmans challenged the principle of legal equality of states: it would have to prove its value or be discarded. He also predicted the relevance of the principle for a new subject of international law: the individual. Almost fifty years later, this article reviews how the principle has fared in international criminal law, a field of international law relevant both to states and to the individual. The review shows how the emergence of a more vertical international legal order has weakened the position of the principle of equality between states. The weakening of the principle in the relation between states has in turn affected the equality between individuals, which has contributed to further actual inequality between states. Contrary to one of Kooijmans's scenarios, the emerging international legal order has not diminished the role of the ‘factual conditions of power politics’. Legal questions on permitted differentiations always involve inherently political assessments. For instance, Kooijmans's concept of ‘juridically relevant’ differences requires a determination of which differences are ‘of intrinsic value for the existence of legal order’, and thus a decision on what that order should look like and how it is to be pursued. Moreover, factual conditions of power politics continue to encroach upon the principle of legal equality. Perhaps the principle of legal equality, like the fight against impunity, is more of an ideal than a reality. But the pursuit of the fight against impunity has thus far undermined the fight for more equality.

The concept of the sovereign State is still at the core of most rules of international law. It is true that both the individual human being and the international organisation have increasingly found recognition in rules of international law as (acting) “entities” which are more than mere “creatures” of the sovereign State or States. Nevertheless, progress in both directions is slow and does not, as yet, really undermine the international system of co-existing sovereign States.

Few subjects are as controversial in international law today as the taking of foreign property. Many of the developing countries assembled within the framework of the semi-official Group of 77 (G. 77) claim that many of the principles and rules pertaining to the protection of foreign property traditionally adhered to by Western developed countries have lost their legal significance; in particular, as a result of legal developments induced by relevant UN resolutions. The question is, to what extent this claim is correct; to what extent the traditional rules have indeed been replaced by new ones, and what the contents of these new rules might be. The present study tries to answer this question, and sets out to review and analyze: first, the main doctrines of traditional customary law concerning the taking of foreign property (Part 2); secondly, the relevant UN resolutions relative to this subject (Part 3); and thirdly, state practice as it manifests itself in the form of one multilateral and 195 bilateral investment protection treaties concluded up to 1983, both between developed and developing countries and amongst developing countries inter se. (Part 4). On the basis of this review and analysis conclusions are drawn in Part 5.

The World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS Agreement) has been the focus of intense scholarly debate regarding the effects of IP protection on the development interests of the global South. Far less attention has been directed at the organizational framework in which future IP norms should be developed. The governing assumption has been that the norm-setting role of the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) remains unchanged notwithstanding the primacy of the WTO as an Organization with explicit mandate for global IP regulation.

In this Article, I argue that the WTO, in a hierarchical division of labor with WIPO, should be promoted as the locus of IP norm-setting, particularly with respect to those norms that affect the regulation and supply of global public goods. IP norm-setting in the WTO is not without risks. Nonetheless, an organizational culture in which IP protection is one of many tools to accomplish defined welfare goals, rather than the raison d'être of the organization's existence, may force open important institutional space in which future IP norms consistent both with the interests of less developed countries and the ideals of mature IP systems, can be meaningfully negotiated. At a minimum, a hierarchical relationship could facilitate inter-institutional competition between the WTO and WIPO, generating additional welfare gains for the international community in the form of greater transparency in the processes of IP norm-setting, improvements in the democratic deficit inherent in international organizations generally, as well as systemic gains from enhanced accountability in the global management of IP.

It has long been generally admitted that coastal States enjoy sovereignty over their internal waters to the same extent as over their land territory. The implication of this has been understood to be that the rules of general international law, concerning the legal order of the seas, do not affect the internal waters of coastal States. For this reason these waters alone have not been the subject of the codification of the law of the sea by general conventions.

The Draft Convention on the Law of the Sea (hereafter referred to as “the Draft Convention”) includes provisions which refer to rules of public international law but which give no indication of either their content or their source. In this paper these provisions are called “rules of reference”. This reference does not mean that the application of the projected Convention itself is overridden by the rules of reference indicated. On the contrary, the indicated rules are incorporated into the projected Convention by reference, as is demonstrated in section 3 infra.

In this article, the meaning and scope of the legal personality of the European Communities will be discussed. As a complementary exercise the question will be raised if the European Union as such is in the possession of a similar capacity.

The text of this paragraph is divided into two parts, each corresponding to the two kinds of obstacles which, at the time, stood in the way of the free exercise of navigation on the Rhine.

When the International Law Commission adopted a plan for its future work on State responsibility in 1970, it decided to set aside for separate treatment “questions relating to responsibility arising out of the performance of certain lawful activities — such as spatial and nuclear activities… [o]wing to the entirely different basis of the so-called responsibility for risk.”

On 28 February 1667, Commander Abraham Crijnsen, with a squadron of three sail and a number of small craft carrying three hundred soldiers, all in the service of the County of Zealand, came up the Surinam River in the then English colony of Guiana.

Multinational Enterprises (MNEs), in the terminology of the United Nations also called Transnational Corporations (TNCs) have developed organizational structures which are so complex that the primary, if not the only, legal concern in international economic relations is no longer the protection of investments in developing countries, as was the case in the 'sixties, but the protection of those countries themselves, and even of (hightly) developted countries.

After years of preparation the Convention on the Law of Treaties was concluded in Vienna on 23 May 1969; it was about another ten years before the Convention entered into force on 27 January 1980. Shortly afterwards, the Government of the Netherlands decided to initiate the constitutional procedure required to become a party to the Convention. For that purpose, a Bill of Approval was submitted to the States-General in March 1983.