The operation of public international organizations and the development of that sector of substantive international law which such organizations administer require that an effective mechanism exist for the authoritative interpretation of their basic instruments.

It is widely acknowledged that international organizations (IOs) indirectly affect customary international law by catalyzing and focusing State practice. But next year the International Law Commission and Michael Wood, its Special Rapporteur on the Identification of Customary International Law, are primed to address a more contentious issue: when and how IOs can directly contribute, like States, to custom.

This past summer the Commission’s Drafting Committee provisionally adopted a draft conclusion stating that “[i]n certain cases, the practice of international organizations also contributes to the formation, or expression, of rules of customary international law.” Based on Wood’s Second Report dated May 2014, three topics merit particular attention in the year ahead: 1) distinguishing State practice from IO practice, 2) scrutinizing potentially relevant types of IO practice, and 3) considering types of cases in which such IO practice might contribute to custom. (While the Drafting Committee declined to include definitions in its draft conclusions, this article defines “IO” as Wood did in his Second Report: “an intergovernmental organization.”)

Recent years have witnessed the expansion of human rights standards relating to migrant domestic workers. This includes, in particular, the adoption of the 2011 International Labour Organization (ILO) Convention on Decent Work for Domestic Workers (no. 189), General Comments from UN human rights treaty bodies, and an expanding body of case law in domestic and regional courts. Migrant domestic workers have played central roles in these cases, engaging in the public sphere to advocate for law reform, and, in doing so, gradually expanding the field of global migration law. This essay describes the emerging recognition evident in the approaches of UN human rights treaty bodies that axes of discrimination intersect and, in particular, that migration status and gender can be significant to the enjoyment of rights. This integrated approach is evident in the case law of international human rights bodies adjudicating the rights claims advanced by migrant domestic workers. The case law on Article 4 of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) shows the potential for such integrated approaches to move beyond the usual fragmentation of human rights, labor, and migration laws, but that potential remains limited.

More than any other international criminal tribunal, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has, in its early years, pursued cases against heads of state. The Court issued arrest warrants for President Omar al Bashir of Sudan and for Muammar Gaddafi while he was Libya's head of state, and it charged Uhuru Kenyatta shortly before he became head of state of Kenya. These attempts to prosecute heads of states have not only led to tensions between the Court and the African Union,1 but also pit the desire to hold senior leaders accountable for grave international crimes against the customary international law principle that certain senior state officials—especially heads of state—have immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction by virtue of their status, including immunity from arrest and their inviolability when abroad.2

In its decision yesterday in Bond v. United States, the Supreme Court carefully avoided addressing either the constitutional scope of the treaty power or the scope of Congress’s constitutional authority to implement treaties under the Necessary and Proper Clause. The decision is nevertheless important in holding that a federalism-based clear statement requirement, which was originally developed in the context of purely domestic legislation, applies even to legislation implementing a treaty. It also signals more generally (as had earlier decisions such as Medellín v. Texas) that the Court will be attentive to federalism values even in cases involving foreign affairs. In this post, I will highlight both a process point in support of the Court’s clear statement approach and a potential drawback of that approach. I conclude with some miscellaneous observations about the decision.

The challenges of attributing malicious cyber activity—that is, identifying its authors and provenance with a sufficient degree of certainty—are well documented. This essay focuses on a phenomenon that I call “attribution by indictment.” Since 2014, the United States has issued more than a dozen indictments that implicate four foreign states in malicious cyber activity: China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea. Ten of these indictments were issued in 2018, suggesting that this practice is likely to continue and even intensify in the near term. Attribution by indictment uses domestic criminal law, enforced transnationally, to define and enforce certain norms of state behavior in cyberspace. This essay analyzes the U.S. practice of attribution by indictment as a response to malicious cyber activity.