The 1974 Diplomatic Conference on the Reaffirmation and Development of International Humanitarian Law Applicable in Armed Conflicts was the first attempt by a full-fledged diplomatic conference in 25 years to create new law for the protection of victims of wars. It was also the first time in some 40 years that a diplomatic conference has taken up the question of restricting the use of conventional weapons. And it was the first time since before World War I that an international conference had looked extensively at the question of methods of attack and had weighed their impact on the civilian population.

Agreements providing for the arbitral settlement of disputes arising out of contracts between foreign sovereigns and private contracting parties have become a permanent feature of transnational commerce.

This particular favor for the arbitral, as opposed to the judicial, settlement of state contract disputes is attributable to a number of reasons, some of which are conventional and others the consequence of contemporary developments. Traditionally, arbitration has proved attractive because of the special expertise that it may provide and lack of publicity, which may increase the willingness of the losing party to comply with the award.

Transitional states have elected divergent strategies in dealing with their pasts. Some have opted not to confront the past at all by invoking general amnesty laws, whereas others have determined that some form of accountability is needed. Postapartheid South Africa presents a novel illustration of the attempts of a transitional state to balance the legal, political, practical, and cultural interests of its society as it moves toward the democratic ideal. In this vein, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to examine whether individual amnesty was the optimal method of accountability for South Africa to deal with its past; and second, to analyze the extent to which the Amnesty Committee has succeeded in its application of the individual-amnesty provisions and the effects of those efforts.

The United States and Canada agreed, by the Boundary Settlement Treaty of March 29, 1979, to submit their decade-long dispute over the maritime boundary in the Gulf of Maine area to a Chamber of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) or to an ad hoc court of arbitration. The treaty, however, has not yet taken effect because the interrelated Fisheries Agreement, which was concluded on the same day and was to take effect simultaneously, was Unilaterally scrapped by the United States Government on March 6, 1981, on grounds of its allegedly unfair and inflexible provisions. On April 29, the United States Senate unanimously adopted a resolution supporting the Government's position to delink the two treaties and to settle the maritime boundary problem first by a third-party procedure. Whether or not a new fisheries agreement is concluded in the near future, it is expected that the maritime boundary dispute will ultimately be resolved by binding third-party settlement. The purpose of this article is to examine the legal position taken by each Government regarding the maritime boundary issues, and to suggest equitable principles that should govern their resolution.

The convention of the Second Hague Conference respecting the subject of contract claims alleged to be due by one state to the subjects of another has a special interest to the citizens of the twentyone American republics, particularly the first article of the convention, which reads as follows:

Intensive campaigns of hostile and subversive propaganda against the territorial integrity and political order of foreign states have constituted one of the most disturbing factors in the international life of the postwar period. Powerful groups, frequently with governmental toleration or support, clamor for the incorporation in their several states of territories inhabited by populations of like nationality. Vigorous and systematic incitement of foreign subjects to disaffection or revolt against their own governments is the method generally adopted to attain this end. The consequent state of tension in the relations of the states concerned presents a real and actual threat to international peace. The dangerous situations which always result from a lack of coincidence between national and political frontiers have been intensified by the rise in several states of dictatorial régimes, which are disposed to press with special vigor their territorial claims. Hostile propaganda, especially if carried on with the sanction of nationalistic governments, “inevitably results in what might be termed the obliteration of the border-line between the state of peace and the state of war.” It tends always to create an atmosphere conducive to the occurrence of those “incidents” which have so frequently led to major conflicts.

In this short piece, I open a conversation over how the Colombian Final Peace Accord provides evidence of, and a contribution to, a more general lex pacificatoria or “law of the peacemakers” (lex pax for short). In light of the Accord’s recent ballot defeat, I integrate into this assessment the merits of using a referendum to approve (in Colombia’s case “affirm or deny”) the Agreement as a whole. Throughout, I draw on a peace agreement database which has coded over one thousand four hundred peace agreements since 1990 for comparative insight.

In May 2018, U.S. President Donald Trump spoke about illegal border crossings: “We have people coming into the country, or trying to come in … . You wouldn't believe how bad these people are. These aren't people. These are animals.” Such dehumanization (in this case of undocumented migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border) has been a standard discursive strategy to prepare, instigate, facilitate, and exculpate violence committed by humans against other humans throughout history. It is exactly in reaction to excesses of such dehumanizing mass violence committed in the Third Reich and during World War II that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was adopted in 1948. This essay argues that the objectives of the UDHR itself would be furthered if the United Nations (or another international body such as the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, or the World Organisation for Animal Health (OIE)) engaged in work on a universal animal rights declaration. While animal welfare is increasingly protected in domestic jurisdictions, animal rights are still hardly recognized, although they would serve animals better. Animal rights would need to be universalized in order to have an effect in a globalized setting. The international legal order is flexible and receptive to nonhuman personhood. The historical experience with international human rights encourages the international animal rights project, because it shows how the equally pertinent objection of cultural imperialism can be overcome. Animal rights would complement human rights not least because the entrenchment of the species-hierarchy, as manifest in the denial of animal rights in many cases, condones disrespect for the rights of humans themselves.

Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered an unprecedented wave of sanctions targeting every facet of the Russian economy. In the early months of the conflict, the sheer scope, speed, and coordination of this response to Russia's aggression instills hope that economic pressure may yet play a decisive role in this conflict. But the massive scale of the effort is also cause for concern. In particular, it highlights the relative lack of legal constraints governing economic warfare, even in the face of potentially grave harms to third parties and the global economy. While these concerns have provoked no shortage of proposals for reform, the fragmented institutional landscape and a lack of political will are likely to frustrate any attempts at far-reaching transformation.

The responses of states and the WHO to the COVID-19 pandemic reveal the considerable weaknesses of international organizations. Although the Trump administration has misdiagnosed the WHO's ills, the WHO has indeed failed to meet the public health threat posed by the coronavirus. The WHO's responses to the current crisis demonstrate that it shares five disorders common to other UN system expert-driven organizations: overdependence on states; singular reliance on “managerial” approaches to enforcement; inflexible emergency declarations; absence of regularized systems for inter-regime collaboration; and common bureaucratic pathologies.

In August 2016, in Havana, Cuba, the Colombian Government signed a peace agreement with the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia-Ejército del Pueblo, FARC-EP, after four years of negotiations. The agreement provided a window of hope that Colombia's fifty-year armed struggle, the longest-running conflict in Latin America, would finally come to a close. One actor in these negotiations, whose considerable influence has been underappreciated, is the Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Colombia has been under preliminary examination by the OTP since 2004. In addition to discharging its investigatory function, the ICC prosecutor has actively influenced the negotiation of two peace processes: first, the 2005 peace process with the paramilitaries; and more recently, the tumultuous negotiations with the FARC. This Comment explores the specific pathways of the OTP's influence in the Colombian peace process, and the broader lessons this episode holds for the ICC's work and for the continuing negotiations in Colombia.

Recognition of governments serves three functions in the international legal system: ensuring that only regimes clearly deserving such status are accepted as governments of states, assuring new governments that others will respect their status, and informing courts, government agencies, and nationals of recognizing states that a particular regime is in fact the government of another state. Lately, some statesmen and a respectable number of legal scholars have come to view recognition of governments as causing more difficulties than it is worth as it is now used. In particular, they suspect that decisions whether to recognize a new regime often depend more on its character or policy than on its ability to meet the objective test of effectively ruling its state, and they believe that current doctrine on the effects of recognition or nonrecognition creates unnecessary confusion.

After the Rwandan genocide of 1994, the United Nations Security Council moved quickly to establish an international tribunal to indict the architects of the slaughter. Whether motivated by a sincere desire for international justice or a self-serving desire to assuage international guilt for the lack of significant military intervention, one thing is clear: the Security Council began a program that, when coupled with its establishment of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, represented the most significant return to international criminal justice since the Allied prosecution of German war criminals at Nuremberg. But so much had changed since 1951. Whereas the Nuremberg Tribunal imposed death sentences for the most culpable instigators of the Holocaust, there would be no death sentences for the architects of the Hutu genocidal campaign against the Tutsi. Over the course of forty years, there was a sea shift in attitudes about the legality of the death penalty. When the Allies announced their decision to apply the death penalty at Nuremberg, few objected or suggested that executions would violate international human rights law. Indeed, Churchill was initially suspicious of the plan for a war crimes tribunal, having assumed that what remained of the Nazi leadership would simply be executed on the battlefield. As the proceedings unfolded, there were isolated calls for leniency and clemency, and even complaints of victors’ justice, but certainly no suggestion that executions violated international law as such.

The press reports characterized the resolution of the Chaco Commission of the League of Nations Assembly as amounting “to condemning Paraguay henceforth as the aggressor in the Chaco War.” This resolution of January 16, 1935, recommended a raising of the arms embargo in behalf of Bolivia, because Bolivia had accepted and Paraguay had rejected the Assembly’s report made on November 24, 1934, under Article 15, paragraphs 4 and 9 of the Covenant.

There are some problems of international law which at times are felt to be in the air. Today without doubt one of these questions is that of original acquisition of territorial sovereignty. Arbitration cases such as those concerning the Island of Palmas and Greenland started a heated discussion of the principles involved in the field of scientific research.

For more than 20 years the Italian Constitutional Court and the Court of Justice of the European Communities have disputed the proper relation between Community and national law. In S.p.A. Granital v. Amministrazione finanziaria, the Constitutional Court recently adopted a position consistent with the Community Court’s view of the supremacy of Community law. Italian constitutional law doctrines on international law profoundly affected this development and may in turn be altered as the implications of the Constitutional Court’s view of Community law are worked out.