The fifty-eighth session of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights opened with the United States in an observer seat for the first time ever. The Commission ultimately adopted ninety-two resolutions and eighteen decisions, thirty-nine of which were adopted by roll-call vote. Subsequently, at its July 2002 session, the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC, the parent body of the Commission) approved nearly all of the Commission's decisions by similar votes. The United States was also reelected to the Commission for its fiftyninth session during a separate ECOSOC meeting.

The debate during the Commission's deliberations was more chaotic and fractious than in prior years, reflecting the membership of an increased number of repressive governments that sought to block international scrutiny of their human rights practices.

This legislation constitutes belated recognition of the need for granting to international organizations of which the United States is a member, and to their personnel, a legal status which is adequate to ensure the effective performance of their functions and the fulfillment of their purposes. It will “not only protect the official character of public international organizations in this country,” as the Senate Committee on Finance has stated, “but it will also tend to strengthen the position of international organizations of which the United States is a member when they are located or carry on their activities in other countries.”

During the five years that have elapsed since the close of hostilities in World War II, approximately one-half of the nations of the world have adopted new constitutions or have drastically revised existing ones. While some constitutions have been the products of a more or less regular modification, others have marked a revolutionary, though peaceful, development in conformity with Western political traditions. Some have followed the re-emergence of nations in defeat, and others have signalized the birth of new members of the family of nations. Finally, the régimes of the “People’s Democracy” have established instruments of government which are revolutionary both in their origin and their content.

No more acrid struggle raged in Soviet legal circles during the year 1937 than that over the search for a suitable theory of international law. For eight years lawyers had turned to Eugene B. Pashukanis as the leading Soviet theoretician in this field, but today his position is gone, his books are banned, and he is called an enemy of the people.

The freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines, one of the most venerated high seas freedoms under the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), faces an uncertain future under the new international legally binding instrument (ILBI) being negotiated in the United Nations. UN General Assembly Resolution 72/249, authorizing the intergovernmental conference for the new ILBI, does not expressly mention submarine cables or pipelines but states that “the work and results of the conference should be fully consistent with the provisions of” UNCLOS. The issues in a new ILBI that are likely to have an impact on the freedom to lay submarine cables and pipelines in areas beyond national jurisdiction are (1) area-based management tools, and (2) environmental impact assessments (EIAs), which are mechanisms used to protect and preserve the marine environment and biodiversity. The challenge for high seas governance (and indeed, the perennial challenge for the law of the sea) is how to balance these two ostensibly competing, but equally valuable, interests: the protection of the marine environment and biodiversity and the high seas freedom to lay submarine cables in areas beyond national jurisdiction.

Pons, Lord, and Stein's article entitled “Disability, Human Rights Violations, and Crimes Against Humanity,” offers a timely and comprehensive analysis of the necessity to legally frame and approach crimes against persons with disabilities across the globe as crimes against humanity (CAH). National public inquiries examining the systematic violations against persons with disabilities repeatedly demonstrate how, despite efforts to report such heinous crimes, these violations remain largely ignored and nearly always unprosecuted. In the Global South and East, violations may be accentuated as complex historical, economic, (geo)political, cultural, ideological, spiritual, and even religious beliefs come into play alongside shifting landscapes of civil unrest, war, and state militarization. Within such contexts, legal measures for the protection of persons with disabilities, particularly for minority communities, meet extraordinary barriers. In this essay, we identify a number of core issues that constrain the possibilities of investigation and prosecution of CAH committed against persons with disabilities living in the Global South and East. Even though such laws are largely grounded in practices and institutions of the Global North, this essay emphasizes the need to ensure that accountability efforts for CAH perpetrated against persons with disability are rigorous in their design, robust in their application, and recognize the heterogeneity of persons with disability on a global scale.

Jacqueline Peel and Jolene Lin make an important contribution to the climate change litigation literature through their analysis of emerging climate change litigation in the Global South. Their article provides insights into patterns in that litigation and implications for how the cases may fit into transnational climate change governance. As Peel and Lin discuss, context matters greatly in establishing pathways for climate change litigation and determining regulatory impact. They acknowledge that the countries that they study as a group have significant differences among them and that these differences influence how this litigation is emerging. However, their article largely focuses on differences in legal systems and available legal mechanisms. This essay builds upon their article by considering how the geography of climate change interacts with this emerging litigation.

The roles that Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) scholars could play in political and/or socio-economic struggles beyond the academy, and the relationships of these scholars to politicians, diplomats activists, civil servants, peasant movements, civil society, and other nonacademic actors are issues as important to TWAIL as they are understudied and underenacted. The three essays in this TWAIL Symposium take up this theme of praxis.

This article offers a U.S. perspective on the creation of the Yugoslav and Rwanda criminal tribunals as each nears its conclusion following more than twenty years of judicial proceedings. During the period in which the tribunals were created, one of us (MJM) was the Acting Legal Adviser or Principal Deputy Legal Adviser of the U.S. Department of State, and the other (DS) was Senior Adviser and Counsel to the U.S. Permanent Representative to the United Nations and was subsequently the first U.S. Ambassador-at-Large for War Crimes Issues. Given the leading role played by the United States in the process of creating the tribunals, we hope that our perspective might help to illuminate the critical issues faced at that time.

This review essay examines four edited volumes released in 2018 that address questions concerning the “legitimacy,” “authority,” and “performance” of international courts and tribunals (ICs). Each of the four volumes has a somewhat different focus.

The inter-American human rights system (IAS) faces a region that has turned distinctly hostile to human rights. For many, the ongoing crisis in Venezuela is ground zero, demonstrating the ineffectiveness of international human rights when confronted with an entrenched regime supported by major powers such as Russia and China. In this multipolar world, reinforced by a transactional and antiliberal U.S. foreign policy, human rights concerns seem to have little salience. Moreover, the regional Right-wing trend and the so-called populist resurgence underpin a political vision in the Americas that is distinctly antirights. And to make matters worse, some argue, we are anyway in the end-times of human rights—the age of international courts and liberal cosmopolitanism is over. While recognizing that these overlapping political trends pose clear challenges to the IAS, this essay offers a more cool-headed analysis to suggest that the system's future is likely to be less apocalyptic than the doomsayers predict. The first part of the essay takes a sober look at the multiple political challenges facing the IAS today and their implications for human rights advocacy. In the second part, against the background of the inhospitable conditions facing human rights activists in the region, I highlight the role of civil-society actors in strengthening and embedding the IAS. As it is precisely the regional embeddedness of the IAS on which the system's future hinges, the third part highlights the need not only to defend progress, but also to strengthen resilience.