Radhabinod Pal, a judge at the Tokyo Tribunal, wrote a dissenting opinion absolving all the accused Japanese of the alleged crimes. In so doing, he advanced several conceptual and theoretical arguments to support his opinion. This paper focuses on the opinion of Pal concerning non-retroactivity of law, global democracy, imperialism, and victor's justice. The paper analyses his opinion in the light of contemporary developments and argues that his criticisms of the international criminal law regime and global justice are still relevant.

The adoption of the Rome Statute is a significant moment for international criminal law. Before its formulation, the criminal law was governed by the sources mentioned in their statute or Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice [ICJ Statute]. Custom is one of the important sources within the ICJ Statute. The ad hoc tribunals applied custom and even formulated certain customs. The formulation of custom is considered as against the principle of legality. To avoid such criticism, the State Parties inserted Article 21 in the Rome Statute. The provision clarifies the law which the court can apply. The parties chose not to include custom explicitly. However, the wordings of the provision indicate that the custom is still a source for the court. Apart from the wording of Article 21, other provisions of the Statute give ample scope for the application of custom.

At the second Belt and Road forum in 2019, the Chinese government set out its intentions to develop a “Green Belt and Road”. This paper will examine critical issues arising from green-financed projects under the Belt and Road. In particular, the root issue of the lack of harmonized sustainability standards for green bonds globally. While there are positive regulatory developments, there is still a big gap between companies’ reporting metrics and investors’ growing expectations of what constitutes “green”—constituting “green washing”. This issue compounds as green projects under the Belt and Road are often complex infrastructure projects, where unexpected (and negative) externalities may sometimes occur on the ground. In this regard, this paper advocates for robust risk management, where accurate forecasting of environmental harm and stakeholder engagement are implemented actively throughout the project's life cycle. Finally, adequate dispute resolution and avoidance measures should be adopted to protect stakeholders.

The Adamakopoulos and Others v. Cyprus Decision is noteworthy because it provides a blueprint for mass claims proceedings in investment treaty arbitration, justifying the possibility of addressing investment claims en masse in the future. This case comment reviews the background to the dispute, addresses the majority decision on the mass claims, and comments on the Tribunal's reasoning regarding the non-requirement of additional consent to mass claims arbitration, the homogeneity of the claims, and procedural flexibility.

This paper examines the use of a specific international legal fiction. It is claimed that a legal fiction was confirmed by the Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration (2016). The paper asks whether this is an effective legal fiction. The paper will argue that this is not so, pointing to the difficulties that the fiction necessarily creates. From this example, lessons may be learned of the phenomenon of legal fictions of international law generally, and, crucially, of their effectiveness.

Access to and from the sea for landlocked states has been a long-standing issue in the law of the sea. Such issue is also addressed by the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea (or Aktau Convention), which foresees a right of free access to other seas for landlocked State Parties—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan—through the Russian Federation. At the same time, it upholds the transit state's sovereignty and right to protect its legitimate interests. Consequently, it is important to assess the limits of the transit state's discretion pursuant to the Aktau Convention. In this regard, that instrument has important linkages with UNCLOS and with general international law. These linkages introduce in the Aktau Convention various norms—such as due regard and reasonableness—that play an important role in its interpretation.

Upon the 2014 State of Palestine's accession to Geneva Convention III, captured Palestinians who took part in belligerent acts against the occupier should be treated as prisoners of war due to the fact that they belong to a party to an armed conflict. These individuals fall under three categories: members of security forces, affiliates of armed resistance groups, and uprisers who fight the occupant spontaneously on an individual basis. Contrary to established rules of IHL, Israel does not make any distinction regarding the status of these three types. Unilateral Israeli treatment of its captives does not hold water under international law. Such actions may trigger liability based on international criminal law, particularly as the ICC decided in 2021 that it possesses jurisdiction to investigate crimes occurring in the territory of Palestine. The mere fact of confining prisoners of war after the cessation of hostilities may constitute a ground for criminal prosecution.

Using Michel Foucault's concept of modes of objectification, this paper argues that treaties, declarations, and agreements constitute international juridical forms that transform human beings into legal subjects. It retraces the objectification of “natives” in nineteenth-century colonial treaties that made human beings accessories to territories and transformed them into colonial subjects. This legal construct, the paper contends, was rendered unstable in the UN era when treaties re-objectified the “natives” into “peoples”, thereby allowing colonial subjects to re-subjectify themselves into actors and re-describe themselves with an adjective, a nationality. The paper then brings the history to the twenty-first century and posits that ASEAN is now objectifying new trans-national subjects that are ontologically connected to the regional economy. This history of legal subjectivity reveals not only the power of international juridical forms as a mode of objectification, but also the trajectory of subject formation in Southeast Asia under the ASEAN Charter.

Despite the Qing Empire's formal inclusion as a member of the Eurocentric community of states by the turn of the 20th century, its lack of full sovereign status was frequently reasserted in practice. This included proceedings where legal norms were unilaterally applied to it as an object of regulation, provoking a pursuit of agency. In particular, the unprecedented foreign occupation and administration of China after the Boxer crisis of 1899–1901 spurred efforts in pedagogy, legal reform, and diplomacy. Several such efforts subsequently overlapped at the Second Hague Conference in 1907. There, Qing diplomats for the first time influenced multilateral negotiations, and discovered a nascent solidarity with other “weak” states in Latin America and Asia. Joint struggle against great power initiatives sparked new conversations about the equality of states, however, major questions about the implications of sovereign status for genuine agency, and the contingent forms of international legal “progress,” remained unresolved.

As the damage caused by COVID-19 has increased exponentially, so too has the insistence that China bears some international responsibility for the unquantifiable damage sustained as a direct result of the state having failed to contain the virus, and to notify the international community of its existence. Some have suggested that the international contagion of the virus may be classified as transboundary harm. The current article analyses the law of transboundary harm, and proposes a set of criteria based on treaty and precedent that may be relied on to properly classify an event as such. It concludes that it is not only incorrect to classify international contagion as transboundary harm, but that to do so would pose a significant risk to the position and treatment of the individual in international law.