It is the purpose of this article to investigate the status of concession agreements in the light of the rules of international law bearing on the power of a state to nationalize property. It is a continuation of an earlier article which explored the nature and function of the concession agreement in the national and international economies. The first article rested on the assumption that legal rules could not be fully understood or evaluated without a fairly clear understanding of the social facts which they were designed to regulate.

COVID-19 has had a profound impact on migrants and refugees the world over. Their pre-existing vulnerabilities were immediately exacerbated as national health systems were often overwhelmed and many disease control measures were either inaccessible to them or had disproportionate socio-economic effects. But migrants and refugees have also been framed as prima facie causes for the transboundary spread of the virus, and public health exception and derogation clauses in both national and international refugee and human rights instruments have been used to block their entry, suspend asylum processing, or trigger deportations. Taking the example of Brazil as a point of departure, the present contribution argues that (for at least some states) the appearance of the virus seems to have served as a legal carte blanche for fundamentally reconfiguring or closing down border regimes. More specifically, we argue that the strategic mainstreaming of global health regulations into border regimes points to the emergence of a “pandemic law” that encroaches upon already fragile transnational legal regime complexes, with the potential to upend or hollow out existing frameworks for migrant and refugee protection.

This subject, which was brought so forcibly to the attention of the civilized world by the operations of the Russo-Japanese war in the vicinity of Port Arthur, was one of the questions at the Hague conference last year, being thus brought for the first time to the attention of an international conference.