The dispute between Hungary and Slovakia concerning the Gabcïkovo-Nagymaros project could easily be described as one of the most important cases to come before the International Court of Justice (“the Court”) in recent years. The case raised a number of very important questions of international law, many of which had received no previous consideration in the Court's jurisprudence. In the first place, the Court was asked by both parties for orders of specific performance. Although the competence of the Court to issue orders of specific performance or injunctive relief had been the subject matter of much discussion in the academic literature, the issue had never before been raised squarely before the Court. Second, this was the first dispute in which the Court was directly asked to consider the consequences of the legal developments in the field of environmental protection. Despite the proliferation of treaty developments in that field, the status of many of those norms remains problematic Third, although the relationship between the law of treaties and the law of State responsibility has generated much general interest, the Court had not in the past been presented with an opportunity to pronounce on some of these issues. Finally, this is also one of the few cases in which the Court has been asked to consider the legal implications of State succession outside the context of decolonisation.

This article argues that a new understanding of the indivisibility of human rights has emerged through the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). The CRPD has blurred the distinction between civil and political rights, on the one hand, and economic and social rights, on the other. After showing how this distinction has been blurred in the Convention, the article critically analyses the impact this has had on the concept of indivisibility, as well as its consequences for international human rights law more generally. It shows that there is now a shift away from a preoccupation with different categories of rights and towards concern for the real and actual enjoyment of human rights.

When the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) released a letter in early 2012 addressing the financial and economic crises, it was long overdue. Finally, and around four and a half years after the crises began, the body responsible for monitoring those rights that had been most severely impacted had spoken. But what had been said? This article examines the alterations to the doctrine of non-retrogression that the 2012 Letter instigated. It does so by reference to the ‘Business as Usual’ and ‘accommodation’ theories of emergency response. The Letter to States is argued to have taken the Committee away from an approach to non-retrogression that treated times of normality and emergency in a similar way, and towards an approach that allows derogation-style deviations from the Covenant. This, it is argued, could have detrimental effects for the protection of economic and social rights. The difficulties in applying such an approach are considered.

The beginning of the new millennium spawned a biosafety protocol1 for the transboundary movement of genetically modified organisms,2 against the background of an existing WTO code3 concerned mainly with liberal trade. The co-existence of the two codes, and their almost separate development, reflects the fact that the international movement of GMOs raises concerns both of biosafety and liberal trade. However, their co-existence also invites a number of questions—viz., the level to which they complement each other, the level of duplication, and the levels to which they are adequate qua normative frameworks for biotechnology products. In short, the two systems beg the question whether they co-exist happily, or provide for incoherence. This article is not intended as an exhaustive analysis of the codes, but rather as a framework for a focus on the respective codes, as well as their relationship to each other, from a legal perspective.

Internet communication has long been known to pose a challenge to private international law and its reliance on geographical connecting factors. This article looks at the problem from the perspective of EU private international law and argues that the way in which it has been accommodated by Regulations Brussels I, Rome I, and II conflicts with some of its central paradigms. It advances an alternative approach that would generally submit claims against information society service providers established in the EU to the jurisdiction and substantive laws of their ‘country of origin’ but make certain exceptions for private persons and consumers. The article argues that implementing such an approach would require little legislative change, be more faithful to the particularities of internet communication, and give greater effect to the central paradigms of EU private international law.

The ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’ in 2003 raised many international legal questions, which all have been more or less addressed in the academic literature since then. However, the thrust of the relevant legal etiology pertained to the implementation of a series of UN Security Council Resolutions, whose hermeneutics, ie the rules of interpretation, in contrast to other issues, have been scarcely explored and elucidated. Accordingly, the purpose of this article is to address the latter question of the hermeneutics of Security Council Resolutions, and propound a coherent thesis in this respect, which would be applicable not only in the Iraqi conflict but even beyond. It will examine, first, whether the provisions of Articles 31–33 of VCLT are applicable either ipso jure or mutatis mutandis in this respect and then having deprecated both of these options, it will turn its focus to the question of which theoretical framework in relation to the hermeneutics in international law could better serve its purposes. Drawing insights from, amongst others, Stanley Fish, Ian Johnstone and Aharon Barak, it will be possible to propound the thesis that any relevant regulatio interpretations should pay due regard to the institutional setting of the ‘community’ of the Council, which in turn qualifies the ‘inter-subjective’ approach or the collective will of the Council in light of the object and purpose of the Charter, ie the maintenance of peace and security, as the most pertinent hermeneutic paradigm. Premised upon the latter, the article proceeds and articulates a rubric of interpretive principles and presumptions to be applied in this regard, which, at the end, will be tested in the case of ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.

The United Nations Security Council is often described as an opaque body, closed in both membership and approach, and unaccountable for its conduct. For many years, this view has motivated calls for reform to the Council's working methods. This article aims to shine light on the Council's approach to process matters, recognizing the Council's preference for making change through developments in practice. The article reviews the efforts undertaken by the ‘Small Five’ group of States from 2005 to 2012, followed by the efforts since 2013 of the Accountability, Coherence and Transparency Group, while also acknowledging the contributions made by Japan. With some proposals having received some degree of Council support, the sustained implementation of change is identified as the key priority. The article argues for the contextual application of the key concepts of transparency, engagement and accountability, as well as prevention, to provide a principled basis for both the maintenance and development of working methods reform.

The right to vote is the most important political right in international human rights law. Framed within the broader right of political participation, it is the only right in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights not guaranteed as a universal human right but rather as a citizen's right. While limitations on the right to vote are permissible in respect of citizenship and age, residency-based restrictions are not explicitly provided. However, recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights endorse a view that voting rights may be conditioned on residency on the grounds of an individual's bond to their country-of-origin and the extent to which laws passed by that government would affect them. This article questions this proposition and explores whether disenfranchisement based solely on residency constitutes an unreasonable and discriminatory restriction to the essence of the right.

In July 2001, 40 years after the entry into force of the 1959 Antarctic Treaty, the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Parties (ATCPs) decided to establish a Permanent Secretariat to the Treaty. This latest development within what has been described as ‘an evolving international institutional structure’ will undoubtedly serve to strengthen the Treaty, as well as provide support for the wider Antarctic system, in particular, the 1991 Environmental Protocol. Its impact within the wider environmental institutional context will depend to an extent upon the grant of legal personality to the secretariat, and the definition of its functions, rights and privileges. Described as an historic and landmark decision, the establishment of a permanent secretariat has the potential indirectly to provide an additional line of defence in the fight to preserve and protect the Antarctic environment. The purpose of this article is to consider the future impact of, and issues relating to, this significant institutional development.

With China's resumption of sovereignty over Macau on 20th December 1999, another step was taken towards the reunification of Greater China. The reunification of Macau as of Hong Kong is based on the principle of “one country, two systems’, under which the socialist systems of the People's Republic of China are not applied in these territories. Instead most constituents of their previous economic, legal and social systems are preserved. In either case China negotiated what are called Joint Declarations for the resumption of sovereignty with the colonial power, under which the terms of “one country, two systems’ were spelled out. China undertook to give effect to the Declarations in Basic Laws, passed by its National People's Congress. Except for defence and foreign affairs, most matters are vested in the new entities, called Special Administrative Regions. The Basic Laws describe the constitutional system established for the regions as being characterised by a “high degree of autonomy’. As such they are an interesting addition to autonomy systems which are increasingly being applied as solutions to problems of divided societies. But the institutional support for the autonomy is particularly weak, and a closer examination of the articulation of the regions with the central authorities suggests that the primary concern in establishing the special administrative regions is less the automony for the people of Hong Kong or Macau as finding a framework for managing different economic systems from those on the mainland (I have developed these arguments in Ghai 1999).

It is generally acknowledged today that comparative law plays a decisive role in the harmonisation of European private law, in particular of European contract law.1 Dölle has emphasised this strong link between comparative law and European integration as early as 1950 in his report on the refoundation of the German Association of Comparative Law:

This article analyses both cooperative and confrontational interactions between domestic judges and UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies. Based on a number of cases collected through multiple databases, this article addresses the basis on which the monitoring bodies encourage the domestic acceptance of their views, general comments, and reports; how domestic courts engage with these findings; on what basis; and why some courts are more willing to engage with these findings. A key argument is that judicial accommodation is highly selective; domestic judges occasionally avoid, discount, and contest the interpretation put forward by the treaty monitoring bodies and thereby pose a challenge to their legitimacy.

A court of law can take various approaches when dealing with a case before it: judicial restraint, judicial activism or a proactive policy. In the present article the recent case law of the International Court of Justice is analysed in this light. The author is of the view that the Court, as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations should, wherever possible, by a careful judicial policy, apart from deciding the case in hand, give guidance and provide clarification on a number of questions which are of primordial importance in present-day international society but still are largely obscure from a legal point of view.

Human rights are one of the great ideas of the twentieth century. After World War II, first Eleanor Roosevelt in relation to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (‘the Universal Declaration’), and then later the drafters of the European Convention on Human Rights (‘the European Convention’) saw human rights as the way to make the world fairer and safer.

It is not generally appreciated that Francis Mann was not an international lawyer at all by training. His thesis at Berlin University was in company law. It was only after he had been in England for some time that he began to write about private international law,1 and his interest in public international law was developed as a result of his friendship with Sir Hersch Lauterpacht. It was not until 1943 that he published anything about public international law, and in that year he published a substantial article in two parts on the relationship between national law and international law, in which he built on the previous work on Judicial Aspects of Foreign Relations by Louis Jaffe2 and on acts of state by Sir William Holdsworth.3 Subsequently he came to make this subject his own, at least in England,4 where the subject has never attracted the attention which it has attracted in the United States.5