The Western response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine has featured remarkable solidarity over diplomatic and sanctioning initiatives. This unity of action, however, has largely not extended to developing or non-Western States. Many such States have, instead, expressed their non-alignment in respect of Western ‘economic warfare’, albeit not infrequently while also condemning Russia's military actions. This article proposes an approach to reconciling the positions of States in different economic, geopolitical and regional/cultural alignments. First, it suggests that current norms on State responsibility do not rule out using collective countermeasures against States accused of erga omnes norm violations, including via sanctions not authorised by the United Nations but rather imposed by coalitions. At the same time, however, it is argued that individual third-party States retain extensive rights to decide whether or not to participate in such initiatives. This autonomous agency can be derived, in part, through the continued applicability of traditional neutrality principles that require all sides to a conflict to respect the status of neutral States. As collective countermeasure initiatives come to be used more frequently in response to global conflicts, the ‘forgotten’ rules of neutrality provide a useful guide for balancing inter-State legal relations.

Litigation has presented itself as a serious means to vindicate normative commitments about climate change by forcing governments to review their policy priorities. Today, the use of such litigation is not limited to the domestic arena. International law now provides the new principal avenue for such litigation. Two litigation strategies stand out: obligations strategy and rights strategy. Obligations strategy consists of bestowing an erga omnes character to existing obligations regarding the protection of the global environment, thereby providing standing for a non-injured party before international courts. Rights strategy, on the other hand, significantly increases in practice. It consists in the invocation, before national and international courts, of remedies for environmental damages through the legal categories of human rights law.

This article sheds light on the potential and limits of these litigation strategies in international law. The argument builds on the specific evolution in the legal architecture of international obligations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The current structure of the UNFCCC now makes it substantially impossible to bring a claim against individual states regarding their specific measures against climate change. The article, by referring to the history of drafting which produced the specific structure, questions the ability of these litigation strategies to remedy the lack of international consensus and to accommodate the technical intricacy of how to turn normative commitments into actual action for climate change.

The article argues that, by bringing a number of changes of systemic proportions in the order of international law, the internationalization of national constitutional human rights law has led to the ‘constitutionalization’ of international law. To build that argument, the paper first critically assesses the constitutionalization narrative. To that end it explains the reasons for its agnostic stance vis-à-vis the constitutionalization narrative and highlights the fact that international law has always contained some general, “constitutional” features that are particular to its systemic physiognomy. The article then explains how human rights law, as a special branch of international law, expands beyond the so-called humanization of international law narrative, acting as an important ingredient in a number of other narratives such as the constitutionalization of international law and the ones that are comparable to it, like legal pluralism and fragmentation. As to the systemic changes the internationalization of human rights has brought to the order of public international law, the examples given are those of collective enforcement at the decentralized level for the protection of common interests/values, sui generis normative hierarchy beyond jus cogens and the idea of the responsibility of states to act in a protective manner linked with the principle of due diligence and the so-called positive effect that human rights develop.