During the COVID-19 pandemic the international community repeatedly called for the equitable distribution of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. However, there was a substantial gap between this rhetoric and State action. High-income countries secured significantly more doses than they required, leaving many low-income countries unable to vaccinate their populations. Current negotiations for the new Pandemic Treaty under the World Health Organization (WHO) attempt to narrow the gap between rhetoric and behaviour by building the concept of equity into the Treaty's substantive content. However, equity is difficult to define, much less to operationalize. Presently, WHO Member States appear to have chosen ‘access and benefit-sharing’ (ABS) as the predominant mechanism for operationalizing equity in the Treaty. This article examines ABS as a mechanism, its use in public health, and argues that ABS is fundamentally flawed, unable to achieve equity. It proposes other options for an equitable international response to future pandemic threats.

The definition and scope of indigenous peoples' human rights are usually contentious in the context of Africa.2 While in recent years indigenous peoples' human rights have expanded immensely internationally, in Africa indigenous peoples' rights are still perceived to be in their infancy.3 At the United Nations, the group of African States delayed the process that finally led to the adoption of the United Nations Declaration of the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in 2007 (UNDRIP).4 At a national level, most of the States in Africa are still reluctant to recognize the specific rights of indigenous peoples.5 Until recently, the African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights (the Commission), the leading human rights institution for the continent,6 had kept a low profile on the issue and had ‘not always interpreted indigenous peoples’ rights favourably'.7 From this perspective Commission regarding the communication submitted by the indigenous Endorois community against Kenya casts new light on the rights of indigenous peoples in Africa.8 The decision, which has already been hailed as a ‘landmark,’9 touches on several crucial issues regarding the development of indigenous peoples' human rights in Africa. This groundbreaking decision did not materialize unexpectedly but is part of a wider evolution of the Commission regarding indigenous peoples' human rights in Africa. It echoes the work of the Commission's own Working Group of Experts on Indigenous Populations/Communities (Working Group) which was established in 2001 with the mandate to focus specifically on the promotion and protection of the rights of indigenous peoples in Africa.10 The mandate of the Working Group is to examine the concept of indigenous communities in Africa, as well as to analyse their rights under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (African Charter).11 In 2003 the Commission adopted the report of the Working Group which proposes several avenues for the recognition and promotion of indigenous rights in Africa.12 The adoption of an Advisory Opinion by the Commission to support the adoption of UNDRIP marked another step toward the affirmation of indigenous peoples' rights in Africa.13 The Advisory Opinion not only participated in unlocking the reluctance of the group of African States to adopt the UNDRIP, but also reflected developments taking place at the international level on the rights of indigenous peoples as well as their connection to the continent. Remarkably, in recent years, the Commission has started to refer to indigenous peoples' rights in its examination of States' periodic reports.14 All these factors and the recent decision of the Commission in the Endorois case indicate the emergence of a consistent jurisprudence on indigenous peoples' rights in Africa.

In this article the legal and institutional issues surrounding the transition to a European Central Bank (ECB) will be discussed. The transition to a single currency entails many legal and institutional issues, both at the European level and at member State level. I will focus on a few main themes.

Security (in a broad sense, see infra, II.B) in Europe is the realm of several regional international organisations, mainly the European Union (“EU”), Western European Union (“WEU”), North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”), the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (“OSCE”) and, to a lesser extent, the Council of Europe, creating a patchwork of regional security institutions that is unique in the world. These organisations interact in many ways and claim to be mutually reinforcing. Is that the case? Is there room for improvement?

A plea of superior orders in response to charges founded upon violations of the international laws of armed conflict has since 1945 been treated as a plea in mitigation of sentence rather than as a defence, a position founded upon article 8 of the 1945 Charter of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. In 1998 the draft Statute of the proposed permanent International Criminal Court appeared, by article 33, to “restore” superior orders as a defence, a move deprecated by some as an apparent softening of the international legal approach to war crimes in an age in which such violations are all too prominently before the world's scrutiny. In fact both the formerly received “Nuremberg” doctrine and the appearance of a radical change, or reversion, in the 1998 Statute can be argued to be erroneous. It is the contention of this paper that far from advancing a new and stricter doctrine, the Charter of the IMT at Nuremberg correctly applied pre-existing doctrine in extreme and unusual circumstances but was mistakenly taken to have developed a new approach which was then applied with potentially distorting effect for the generality of circumstances. In this view the 1998 Statute has merely recognised the essential doctrine of superior orders as it existed prior to 1945 and which, properly understood, should not have been thought essentially to have been changed even in 1945.

On 1 July 2011 the UK Bribery Act 2010 and accompanying guidance finally came into force, marking the end of years of controversy about how and when the United Kingdom would implement the OECD Anti-Bribery Convention. The United Kingdom's very delayed implementation of the Convention provoked an increasingly threatening response from the OECD Working Group on Bribery, and highlighted this body's lack of binding enforcement procedures. By contrast, the OECD's reliance on non-binding guidelines has proved successful in that the UK Guidance draws heavily upon the OECD's guidance on how corporations should prevent the bribery of foreign public officials.

The raison d'être of ASEAN was a political one,1 to secure the region's peace, stability, and development. Against all odds, the founding members, namely, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand signed the ASEAN Declaration on 8 August 1967. Brunei was admitted in January 1984, Vietnam in 1995, which was followed closely by Laos and Myanmar in 1997. Thirty-two years later, on 30 April 1999, ASEAN formally encompassed all ten countries of South-East Asia by admitting Cambodia.2

This article considers the development in several Commonwealth jurisdictions of the law relating to “horizontal subdivisions”2, or subdivided buildings. The latter expression describes the situation where title to land can relate to a slice of defined area or cubic space, which is not grounded on the surface layer of the earth, and is divided not only horizontally, but vertically as well.

The Optional Protocol to the Convention against Torture entered into force on 22 June 2006. It establishes a Sub-Committee for the Prevention of Torture that has authority to visit places of detention and to assess the conditions of that detention as a way to reduce the incidence of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. Additionally, States parties are required to set up complementary national preventive mechanisms. This article explores both how these mechanisms established under the Optional Protocol could operate in the context of the detention of refugees and/or asylum-seekers, which is an increasingly common occurrence in many parts of the world, as well as whether they add value to existing international mechanisms that are already available in this field. It examines the purported applicability of the Optional Protocol to four refugee/asylum situations, namely detention at airports and other border zones; immigration (or administrative) detention, including semi-open (or semi-closed) asylum centres; closed refugee camps; and extraterritorial processing or holding centres. Reviewing definitional, jurisdictional, and practical issues that may impact on the success or otherwise of these new preventive mechanisms, this article concludes by making a number of recommendations to aid their work in the refugee/asylum context.

On 18 November 2012 the ‘Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ (ASEAN) adopted the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). ASEAN has existed since 1967 and as a result allows Southeast Asia to be identified as a ‘region’ comparable with other regions such as Africa, the Americas and Europe which have been seen as such in human rights terms for over 40 years. However, until recently Southeast Asia has not been involved in a process of regional human rights institutionalization which in other regions has been an important means of implementing international human rights treaty commitments adopted by their member-States in global forums. Furthermore, the ten States of ASEAN as a group are parties to relatively few of the principal international human rights standard-setting and monitoring regimes. Hence vesting ASEAN with a human rights mandate would seem to present an opportunity to enhance the range of human rights commitments to which ASEAN States are subject. However, after reviewing the ‘ASEAN human rights mechanism’ it is concluded that much recent ASEAN activity amounts either to political rhetoric or has potential to fragment the human rights norms recognized by those ASEAN States which are committed to international human rights treaties. For the ASEAN States which are relatively uncommitted to international human rights treaty regimes, participating in the ASEAN mechanism may reduce pressure to recognize international norms.

This comment discusses three recent judgments of the European Court of Human Rights in the cases of McElhinney v Ireland, Al-Adsani v UK, and Fogarty v UK. All three applications concerned the dismissal by the courts of the respondent States of claims against a third State on the ground of that State's immunity from suit. They thus raised important questions about the relation the European Convention on Human Rights (the Convention)—especially the right to a fair trial and access to court enshrined in Arcticle 6(1)—and the law of State immunity.

The effectiveness and legitimacy of the Council of Europe can be undermined by the actions of Member States which fail to comply with their international law obligations of genuine cooperation with the organization. This article first briefly examines the practice of international organizations in applying sanctions such as expulsion and suspension to their members. It then explains why it is necessary to discuss potential sanctions that the Council can apply in the context of current controversies involving the Council and Member States. It will be argued that the scale and intensity of challenges distinguish the current state of affairs from other ‘problematic’ periods in the Council's history. It proceeds to outline the considerations that should be taken into account in deciding whether a Member State should be suspended or expelled. These considerations include the implications of sanctions on the legitimacy of the Council of Europe, the level of human rights protection and the financial stability of the organization.

In 2015, frustrated by the slow pace of negotiations in the International Maritime Organisation, the EU issued Regulation 2015/757 on the monitoring, reporting, and verification of carbon dioxide emissions from maritime transport. Echoing the controversial Aviation Directive, the Regulation is intended to support a unilateral market-based measure, and includes emissions from outside EU territory. This raises the question whether, according to international law, the EU has jurisdiction to regulate such ‘extraterritorial’ circumstances. In exploring the appropriate jurisdictional bases, we argue that neither the Law of the Sea Convention, nor world trade law definitively decide this issue. We therefore devote more detailed attention to the customary international law of State jurisdiction supplementing these regimes. We seek to build on the existing analysis by examining climate change as a ‘common concern of mankind’. We argue that this emerging concept has distinct legal implications that can and should be accommodated within the interest-balancing exercise underlying the jurisdictional analysis.