One of the unique features of Israel's legal, military, and political control over the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) has been the review by the Supreme Court of Israel of the actions and decisions of the authorities in those territories. Sitting as a High Court of Justice that has the competence to review the actions of all persons exercising public functions under law, the Court has entertained thousands of petitions relating to the legality of such varied actions as house demolitions, deportations, land requisition, entry permits, and establishment of settlements. There can be little doubt that the very existence of judicial review has had a restraining effect on the authorities. While the Court has not ruled against the government that often, and has provided legitimization for acts of dubious legality, such as punitive house demolitions and deportations, it has handed down some important rulings on questions of principle. Furthermore, in the shadow of the Court, many petitions have been settled without a court ruling, allowing for a full or partial remedy for the Palestinian petitioner.

In a reversal of decades of U.S. foreign policy, on March 25, 2019, President Trump issued a presidential proclamation recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights, a strategic piece of territory captured by Israel from Syria during the Six-Day War in 1967. This move, which generated international criticism, is the latest in a series of actions by the Trump administration that advance the interests of the Israeli government.

Racial injustice and inequality remain contested internationally, and the United Nations remains a prominent site for this contestation. In this essay, we describe the architecture designated by the United Nations to address racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia, and related intolerance. We highlight recent normative and institutional innovations and their connection with older mechanisms and milestones. From our experience within this architecture, we reflect on shortcomings and dysfunctions that are built into it, and discuss pressing threats and challenges. We highlight the twenty-year-long, unprincipled opposition of members of the Western Europe and Other States Group (WEOG) within the United Nations to the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action (DDPA), which they have used to block progressive efforts to dismantle contemporary and historic racial injustice. We also highlight recent successes within the architecture, noting remarkable, if tenuous, shifts in the normative framing of racism and racial injustice at the United Nations.

The International Court of Justice rendered four judgments in 2012: on February 3, a ruling on the merits in Jurisdictional Immunities of the State (Germany v. Italy; Greece intervening), finding that Italy had violated its obligations under customary international law and requiring Italy to ensure that the decisions of its judicial authorities that infringed Germany’s immunities would cease to have effect; on June 19, a ruling on the compensation owed by the respondent in Diallo (Guinea v. Democratic Republic of the Congo), awarding Guinea $85,000 for non material injury to Diallo and $10,000 for material injury to his personal property;on July 20, a ruling on jurisdiction, admissibility, and the merits in Questions Relating to the Obligation to Prosecute or Extradite (Belgium v. Senegal), finding jurisdiction and admissibility, and holding that Senegal had breached its obligations under Articles 6 and 7 the UN Convention Against Torture (CAT); and on November 19, a ruling on admissibility and the merits in Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v. Colombia), finding admissible one of Nicaragua’s final submissions(which Colombia had challenged as a new claim), deciding that Colombia has sovereignty over a number of contested maritime features, and establishing a single maritime boundary delimiting the continental shelf and exclusive economic zones of the two countries.

Managing global migration is one of the most pressing issues of our time. Traditionally, international law has not generally regulated immigration and citizenship law; it defers to state authority in setting up rules and procedures for entry into the territory and citizenry. The lack of clear regulation—and a commonly accepted methodology on how to evaluate discriminatory borders—creates acute problems in terms of protecting human rights, promoting state interests, and setting up international cooperation. Against this background, this essay offers a legal framework to examine when borders are discriminatory. It includes a three-step process that examines the goals, criteria, and means of immigration and citizenship selection. With almost 300 million international immigrants worldwide living outside their country of origin in 2020, developing such a framework has become an urgent need.

This essay focuses on the understanding of positivism in Prosper Weil's time, its trajectory since, and how that trajectory reflects changes that have occurred in global society in the intervening years. The world to which Weil spoke is neither in scientific nor in political and cultural terms the same as ours. Key positivist notions, such as neutrality or Weil's critique of the ideal of the unity of the international community and of the invocation of higher moral values, appear to chain sound normative principles while letting loose real power. At any rate, Weil's ideas have not survived globalization or the critical and historical turn taken in the discipline of international law. And yet “Towards Relative Normativity?” arguably owes its lasting significance to its grasp of the weight of the authority of law in international society.

One measure of how and whether the COVID-19 pandemic reshapes the emerging field of international migration law will be the extent to which transnational civil society and activist movements can counteract the intensification of state border controls that the pandemic has triggered. Before the pandemic, transnational efforts to establish a new normative framework for migration seemed to be accelerating. These efforts included new, if non-binding, global compacts on refugees and migration, and new, if modest, efforts at facilitating global cooperation, alongside innovative approaches to scholarly engagement. Such developments arguably contributed to an emerging framework for protecting migrants under international law. Has the pandemic defeated this potential? State responses to the pandemic have eschewed multilateralism, brought migration to a near standstill, and ignored well-established human rights obligations. Moreover, states are poised to deploy a range of new border management technologies and even more assertively manage migration in the name of “health proofing” borders. Yet at the same time, some progressive state practices have emerged alongside a call from the UN Secretary-General to “reimagine human mobility for the benefit of all.” In this essay, we chart some areas of potentially progressive expansion beyond the status quo, noting not only the substance but also the process by which these norms are emerging.

Sean Murphy’s report on the sixty-fifth session of the International Law Commission (ILC) describes and analyzes the Commission’s activities and decisions from last summer. He focuses his attention, as the Commission did, on the draft articles proposed by the Special Rapporteurs on the topics “immunity of state officials from criminal jurisdiction” and “the protection of persons in the event of disaster,” as well as the Special Rapporteur’s reported draft conclusions on the topic “subsequent agreements and subsequent practice in relation to the interpretation of treaties.” Consideration of these proposals took up a significant amount of the Commission’s time, and they will garner much commentary inside and outside governments, as befits their importance.

By all rights, Prosper Weil's 1983 cri de coeur should be one of many best-forgotten law review articles. It targets, after all, concepts that few dispute today (namely jus cogens and erga omnes obligations, as well as shortcuts to finding universally applicable customary law based on “quasi-universal” treaties). Its other direct target—the distinction between international crimes and delicts—refers to once contentious debates over whether states can be charged with ordinary international delicts as well as international crimes. This has since been eclipsed by the International Law Commission's (ILC's) decision to include, in its Articles of State Responsibility, Article 41 (enumerating the consequences of “serious breaches” resulting from the violation of preemptory norms). And insofar as Weil's foil was the premise that international “delicts” can have a “variable geometry,” that too has been overtaken by events: neither the ILC's turn to “serious breaches” nor the far older proposition that individuals can be prosecuted for international crimes remains the subject of much controversy today.

When the United States terminated its seven-year occupation of Japan in 1954, it did so having signed a peace treaty. By contrast, the United States tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade Hamid Karzai to sign a Bilateral Security Agreement to accompany the drawdown of U.S. forces in Afghanistan. Even if Karzai had agreed to sign, the draft agreement bears much stronger resemblance to an alliance than to a peace treaty; it does not reference hostilities between the United States and Afghanistan, nor does it include any version of the term “peace treaty.”

The contemporary human-animal relationship is highly ambivalent. It is characterized by both the exacerbating exploitative use of animals and a progressing moral concern for the life, dignity, and welfare of animals. With regard to the agricultural use of animals (which is the quantitatively most significant area of animal use and accounts for more than sixty billion land animals slaughtered globally each year), these two poles stand in particular contrast. On the one hand, agriculture has been increasingly industrialized and intensified over the course of the Twentieth Century. The modern system of industrialized animal production (or the “animal-industrial complex”) is marked by a high degree of rationalization, automatization, efficiency, mass production, and profitability, and has turned animals into mere production units—biomachines that convert feed into meat, milk, and eggs. On the other hand, the transformation of agriculture to industrialized animal production has raised grave ethical concerns, and societal discomfort at the systemic disregard for the welfare of farmed animals has grown. Most people cringe at the sight of footage showing the horrifying conditions prevailing in factory farms and slaughterhouses, and the vast majority of society subscribes to the basic moral principle that inflicting unnecessary pain and suffering on animals is wrong (a dictum also underlying the nearly universal prohibition of animal cruelty and which is so ingrained it could be considered a “rule of civilization,” as noted by the dissent in a Canadian appeal decision regarding an elephant in a city-run zoo).

Interest in the criminal aspects of the Israeli settlement project in the West Bank is hardly new; it informed the drafting of Additional Protocol I (AP I) and of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and motivated Israel's rejection of both instruments. The 2009 Palestinian attempt to establish ICCjurisdictionpromptedextensivescholarlydebate on the preconditions for jurisdiction and on its territorial and temporal aspects, as well as on specific admissibility questions, primarily gravity. (Complementarity is not an issue with regard to the establishment of West Bank settlements, since Israeli law and jurisprudence do not prohibit it, although they regulate some aspects related thereto).