My very first publication, admittedly written in a language that many AJIL Unbound readers might be unable or unwilling to read, was an essay on the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) and its effects vis-à-vis third parties. Already back then, I found it difficult to justify how an international treaty could rubber-stamp such a highly uneven state of affairs. The overt acknowledgement of the discrimination between nuclear and nonnuclear states, the hypocrisy about “unofficial” nuclear states, and the Article VI obligation for nuclear states to negotiate effective measures of disarmament, largely ignored in the first twenty years of the treaty, were all elements that contributed to my perception of unfairness, if not blatant injustice. As a young researcher approaching international law with the enthusiasm of the neophyte, however, this looked like a little anomaly in an otherwise fair and equitable international legal order. It did not set off warning bells about the system as such. After all, international law was geared, at least in my eyes, towards enhancing the wellbeing of humanity. It must have been so. And it is not that I leaned particularly on the idealistic side; it seemed normal to me … at the time.

Denazification has uniformly been accepted as one of the primary responsibilities of American Military Government in Germany under both United States and quadripartite general occupation policy statements. The United States has assumed preponderant responsibility for leadership in promoting and developing the Denazification program in Germany, first through the establishment of a comprehensive program in the American Zone and later by inducing the other Occupying Powers to accept much if not most of this program in quadripartite regulations approved by the Control Council at Berlin.

The material in this section is arranged according to the system employed in the annual Digest of United States Practice in International Law, published by the Department of State.

In the fall of 1867, a powerful British expeditionary force, dispatched from India under the command of Field-Marshall Lord Napier and conveyed by over 250 ships, began deploying on the Red Sea coast of Africa. Its mission: rescue two British emissaries and their several assistants who, together with a brace of other Europeans, had been imprisoned by the volatile Ethiopian Emperor Theodore.

The Arab countries long ago aspired to form some kind of union and the movement towards that ideal came to be known as Pan-Arabism. The roots of the movement go back to the time when the various nationalities of the Ottoman Empire rose in revolt against Turkish domination and aimed at eventual separation from Ottoman sovereignty. Some of the Arab countries actually defied Turkish authority and were separated, at least for a definite period of time, from the Ottoman body politic: such were the Arabian Peninsula under the Wahhabis and Egypt under Mohammed Ali.

The basic objective of the Third United Nations Conference on the Law of the Sea is to adopt a comprehensive Law of the Sea Convention. From the records of the long preparatory work of the Conference by the UN Seabed Committee and the discussions at both the Caracas and Geneva sessions of the Conference, it is clear that the final product will be a treaty creating new rules of international law and also updating certain traditional ones. In effect, the comprehensive Law of the Sea Convention is intended to establish a new world order in the ocean space.

On February 6, 2020, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (Court) declared in Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina that Argentina violated Indigenous groups’ rights to communal property, a healthy environment, cultural identity, food, and water. For the first time in a contentious case, the Court analyzed these rights autonomously based on Article 26 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR) and ordered specific restitution measures, including actions to provide access to adequate food and water, and the recovery of forest resources and Indigenous culture. The decision marks a significant milestone for protecting Indigenous peoples’ rights and expanding the autonomous rights to a healthy environment, water, and food, which are now directly justiciable under the Inter-American human rights system.

Based on a comprehensive empirical analysis of maritime disputes during the twentieth century, this Article argues that international courts cast a shadow that markedly changes bargaining by potential litigating states. In particular, the filing of optional declarations under Article 287 of UNCLOS increases states’ use of non-binding methods of dispute settlement, and the Article theorizes that this occurs because the declarations credibly threaten court involvement and provide more information about likely litigation outcomes. The Article's central finding is that states that file Article 287 declarations have fewer maritime claims, more peaceful negotiations, and less need for judicial dispute settlement.

On December 21, 2016, the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) dismissed an action brought by the Front Polisario challenging a decision of the Council of the European Union (EU) approving the conclusion of an agreement between the European Union and the Kingdom Morocco on the reciprocal liberalization of certain agricultural products. The CJEU held, based on the relevant rules of international law applicable between the EU and Morocco, that the agreement did not apply to the territory of Western Sahara. Apart from its obvious political overtones, the judgment is significant in further developing the CJEU's approach to the law of treaties and the principle of self-determination in international law.

To discover the origins in legal theory of the modern principle of territorial waters it is necessary to go back to the theory of the Glossators. There one finds stated for the first time in terms of law some of the elements which made the development of this principle possible.

Much has been written about the legal relationship between China and Taiwan. The discussion often focuses on whether the People’s Republic of China (PRC) or the Republic of China (ROC) is the government of China or what entity has territorial sovereignty over Taiwan.1 It is hard to find definitive answers to these questions. This article seeks to reexamine aspects of the issues in the light of the relevant historical facts and contemporary international law. Although no conclusive answers are possible, this study attempts to open new perspectives that could facilitate the development of a solution acceptable to all interested parties.

The World Trade Organization is at an important institutional crossroads, buffeted by critique and with its once-heralded dispute system in doubt. Despite some achievements at the 2022 MC12 Ministerial Conference, the WTO appears in crisis, without a strong institutional mandate. In this Article, we offer a vision for its future, rooted in a particular interpretation of its past. The WTO's legal architecture is characterized by a resilient pluralism, which seeks to preserve diversity of governance models and regulatory approaches, both economic and political, in the domestic orders of member states. Despite strong pressures to impose a neoliberal vision of the state-market relationship on states, this pluralism has persevered; it offers a response to the WTO's critics and a mandate for the WTO's future.

In an international legal order dominated by states, the individual citizen is generally viewed as lacking international legal personality. It is true with little exception that an individual cannot appear in an international forum, political or judicial, to press his rights. Despite the dramatically increased emphasis upon international protection of basic human rights, individuals have been given access to international dispute-settlement machinery in only a few isolated instances within the United Nations system, and on a regional level pursuant to the European Convention on Human Rights.1

Comparative international law promises to bring fresh attention to the similarities and differences in how international law is understood and approached at the domestic level. Comparative international human rights law applies this focus to similarities and differences in the ways that international human rights law is, for example, interpreted at the domestic level by courts.

The observation that a century in the life of any person, entity, or institution is a worthy milestone holds just as true for a scholarly journal. The prevalence and permanence of academic serials, especially in the legal field, has spawned a growing literature of centennial commemorations. And while too much can be made of the anniversary of a law journal, it does serve as a propitious moment to take stock, not so much of the achievement of longevity as of its intellectual content and scholarly character. That is precisely what I intend for this appreciation of a hundred years of writing in the American Journal of International Law (AJIL).

It seems that the development of the laws of war from the beginnings of our international law to the present day has completed a full circle. With the definitive decentralization of the medieval communitas Christiana and the coming into existence of the national sovereign state, wars appeared in which new methods for the conduct of war—armies of mercenaries on foot, invention of gunpowder—were combined with the deep ideological split between Catholics and Protestants. The wars of that time were conducted with the greatest cruelty and inhumanity, reaching their climax with the terrible Thirty Years’ War, which may well be called a total war.

In a regime of universal most-favored-nation treatment for the entry of goods, where a product originates makes very little difference, except for consumer preferences. Buyers may prefer perfumes made in France, watches from Switzerland, cheese from Holland, but cheese from France, perfumes from Switzerland, and watches from Holland will come into the United States, or Canada, or any other country that grants MFN treatment at the same rate of duty, and there is no incentive (for tariff purposes) for anyone to wrap a product made in Patria in the mantle of Xandia.