This special issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law on the Nigerian international lawyer Taslim Olawale Elias (1914–91) marks the second of the journal's Periphery Series. The collection of essays featured here serves essentially two functions. On the one hand, it pays tribute to an exceptional jurist whose work marked international legal scholarship during the years of decolonization. On the other, it invites critical engagement with the theme of international law's ‘periphery’. The centre–periphery formulation, as explained elsewhere, owes its provenance mostly to recent debates in political economy. It is a spatial metaphor which postulates a structural relationship between a presumed ‘centre’, typically portrayed as advanced or metropolitan, and a less developed and provincial ‘periphery’. In such debates the centre–periphery opposition is assumed as stable, decisive, and representative of the empirical reality of a ‘world out there’. The Periphery Series was launched in 2007, with a special issue on the Chilean jurist Alejandro Álvarez, to foster engagement with the discursive function of centre–periphery oppositions in public international law in its various iterations, and to confront questions of resource allocation, dependency, geography, and power.

Taslim Olawale Elias's intellectual and juristic legacy remains unparalleled in many material respects. He left a remarkable body of work, as an African legal scholar in London in the years between the late 1940s and Nigerian independence, as a legal administrator while he served as Nigeria's first Attorney General and Minister for Justice, among his achievements as the dean of the new faculty of law at the University of Lagos, and as a national and international judge. Born on 11 November 1914 in Lagos, Nigeria, into a family of merchants, he began formal schooling at the age of 12, a fact that was greatly overshadowed by a prodigious academic performance and by the plethora of distinctions and accolades (including sixteen honorary degrees in four continents and a host of national and international honours) that he would acquire during his indefatigable study and practice of the law, and in his contributions to its evolution.

This article takes as its starting point the characterization of T. O. Elias as a representative of a ‘weak’ form of anti-colonial scholarship. Elias had sought to show that the ancient African kingdoms had participated in international legality with European states on an equal footing. The view has arisen in contemporary scholarship that this mode of argumentation is typical of the weak strain, evincing only a continued tendency to underestimate the imperial nature of international law itself. A related criticism is that many Third World scholars like Elias view international law's claim to universality and its ability to be inclusive as relatively unproblematic concepts. This article presents two interlocking claims. First, that while Elias was persuaded by the idea of a universal legal order derived from European thought, he never accepted the European view of universality. Vitoria and Grotius had paved the way for the idea of a universal legal order, but, as Elias was consistently aware, the extension of the European law of nations to Africa and Asia in the name of universality was unaccompanied by theoretical recognition in European legal thought that such universality cannot be unilaterally achieved on specific cultural terms. Second, that Elias did not view universality as an unproblematic concept. While he considered the legal order inherited from the European law of nations never to have been universal in its application, the post-colonial legal order could in principle approximate more closely to an ideal of democratic universality. We focus on Elias's attempt to substitute the doctrinal requirement of individual, sovereign consent with majoritarian lawmaking based on democratic theory, and his faith in the machinery of the United Nations as a ‘technology’ which post-colonial states would employ to put democratic majoritarianism into practice.

This essay critically examines T. O. Elias's international legal scholarship, especially in so far as he sought to reclaim, or claim, a place in international legal history for Africa. Having found that Africa contributed to the formation of international law, Elias argued in favour of reforming its rules so that they could serve the interests of the newly independent African states. In this respect he influenced many contemporary international lawyers in Africa and elsewhere. In particular, his singling out of sovereignty as a barrier to reforming international law is shared by generations of international legal scholars who have criticized states for placing too high a premium on their sovereignty, thereby placing insuperable barriers to their acceptance of egalitarian goals, expressed by, for example, the international bill of human rights. The essay also contrasts Elias to scholars of international law who took the colonial legacy of international law as a barrier to reforming it so that it was consistent with the interests of so-called post-colonial African states.

This article investigates T. O. Elias's constructions of past and future Africas in Africa and the Development of International Law. It locates Elias within Nigeria's educated elite and its oscillating constructions of past and future Africas, and turns specifically to Elias's romanticized African past of the great medieval empires as a source of legitimacy within the broader ‘development’ of international law. The article works through his depiction of ‘customary’ law in Nigeria and how the African past maintains its presence in current law, and then addresses Elias's depiction of the future represented by new pan-African institutions. Finally, the article discusses Elias's depiction of a liberating future or ‘modern’ international law – the move from consent to consensus – in which Africa seems important only within the broader population of new states, and how his conception of international law – citing Jenks and Jessup, Friedmann and Falk – with its commitment to law's reflection of society, fits comfortably within the traditions of a modern sociological jurisprudence.

Taslim Elias's scholarship on the impact of English common law on the growth of African customary law illustrates the intersectionality negotiated between ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’, universal and subaltern laws. His intellectual portrait is also useful as a heuristic device to excise the doctrines, strategies, imageries, and narratives of progress elaborated about ‘Africa’ and ‘law’. Elias decried the contempt and ignorance exhibited by colonial masters towards native customs and laws; he also vilified judicially crafted ‘repugnancy’ and ‘public policy’ doctrines as instruments of colonial policy to prevent British justice from looking both ways, by ensuring that British standards were the ‘objective’ criteria of abrogation and change. Yet he nonetheless saw these doctrines and English law as a unifying force in the emergence of a unified Nigerian legal system. This article argues that this paradox in Elias's work and his struggle against the asserted dualism between English law and African customary law must be situated in the context of the rise of an African legal consciousness or juridical Negritude, home to various political projects of nation-building, African cultural liberation, and development which strategically intersected in their unstable relationship to law and Western culture. This signals a turn to ‘hybridity’ in legal discourse and Elias's professional trajectory seeking to develop a uniform common law for Nigeria as a way to explicate the workings of this relationship, and how African law is inscribed in the interplay of cultural forces constantly (re)negotiating the boundaries of their engagement with one another. This, in turn, reveals a complex picture of mediating between the simultaneous participation of Third World intellectuals in various struggles and personal or ideological projects within African humanism, which an analysis structured around the stability of centres/peripheries conventionally distorts.

The Bosnia Genocide case dealt with several important matters of international law, apart from the issue of responsibility proper for genocide. The Court began by addressing issues of state succession in order to identify the proper respondent. It then found that the objection to jurisdiction raised by the respondent was res judicata. It held that the Genocide Convention created state responsibility in addition to international criminal responsibility of the individual. The contribution of the judgment to the law of evidence, in particular with reference to the standard and methods of proof, is significant. Finally, the Court applied the codification by the International Law Commission of attribution in state responsibility to the situation before it in deciding that the genocidal acts subject of the case were not attributable to Serbia, while also holding that Serbia was, nevertheless, responsible for omitting to prevent genocide.

Co-operation has proved to be one of the greatest challenges in the first practice of the International Criminal Court (ICC). The Court cannot fulfil its mandate effectively without co-operation from states, international organizations, and other actors. The Prosecutor requires co-operation and assistance at various stages of proceedings (preliminary examination, investigation, judicial proceedings) in order to conduct investigations and prosecutions. The Court depends on the co-operation of states to execute the warrants of arrest and proceed to trial. In the context of its first practice, the Court has operated in situations of ongoing conflict and/or environments where the security situation is volatile. The level and modalities of co-operation were influenced by the factual and political conditions on the ground and the institutional support of other entities (e.g. the United Nations).

The ICC Statute sets up a system for enforcement whereby the Court's decisions are to be effected by domestic authorities. The article explores the implications of this institutional design in terms of the legal tools at the Court's disposal and the extent to which the ICC can adjudicate issues related to state co-operation. At the same time, it examines the responsibilities assumed by all states parties under the Statute to secure compliance, including in situations where the requested national authorities are unwilling or unable to co-operate. It suggests that to be sucessful, the co-operation regime under the ICC Statute will require a dynamic set of interactions between the individual state and the collective.

While much has been written about the formation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), less attention has been focused on the enforcement capability of the Court. As demonstrated by the history of the ad hoc international tribunals, one of the most pressing problems for international criminal courts is the arrest and the surrender of suspects, which often requires substantial bargaining between the court and the state in which the suspect resides. We develop a classification of the issues which have the greatest impact on the bargaining influence of the ICC to secure the arrest of indictees, and apply this classification scheme to a study of the four ongoing situations at the ICC in order to explore the bargaining environment in which the ICC operates. While many of the cases have features which should assist the ICC in bargaining with the state, the situation in Sudan represents the greatest challenge for the Court.

This comment questions some of the key assumptions in the article by Roper and Barria with respect to the ICC's power to bargain with territorial states to attain the apprehension and surrender of indictees. The comment notes that, while factors such as the nature of the referral to the Court, the crimes charged, and whether the conflict is still ongoing are likely relevant to the ICC's bargaining power, the effect of these factors is indeterminate. The comment highlights the regional political dimension of the ICC's bargaining leverage in the Great Lakes region of Africa and suggests that the Court's bargaining power is engaged in a path-dependent three-level bargaining game.

On 30 May 2007 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1757(2007), creating the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) to try those responsible for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, which also claimed the life of twenty-two other persons. Following sensitive and unsuccessful discussions about the location of the seat of the tribunal, the government of the Netherlands informed the UN Secretary-General in September 2007 that it was favourably disposed to hosting the tribunal and, after three months of negotiations, signed, on 21 December 2007, in accordance with paragraph 1(b) of the resolution, a Headquarters Agreement enabling the seat of the STL to be in the Netherlands.

Discussions on the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have focused on its impact on Lebanese sovereignty and, specifically, the fact that a Chapter VII resolution seems to bypass Lebanese democracy. Simply relying on the idea of a ‘breach of international peace and security’ to overcome these arguments is not helpful. It is more useful to locate the creation of the Tribunal within evolving international criminal justice practices. These practices are increasingly constraining the Security Council's own work rather than the contrary, as international criminal justice gradually emancipates itself from the confines of ‘international peace and security’ and becomes a logic unto itself.

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is the latest international criminal tribunal to be established by the United Nations. Similar in many respects to the earlier institutions – for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone – it stands alone in the fact that its subject-matter jurisdiction does not contain any international crimes. It is thus international in some respects, but it is arguably not an international criminal tribunal in the sense that was intended by the International Court of Justice in the Yerodia case. The drafting history of the Statute of the Special Tribunal is examined with a view to determining whether the new court should treat sovereign immunity in the same manner as the other three UN criminal tribunals.

This article proceeds from two basic assumptions: that international criminal courts are engaged in writing history, and that this may influence the legal framework in which they operate. Against this background, the article takes a closer look at the Statute of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in order to investigate allegations that the Tribunal has been tailor-made to further a certain view of recent Lebanese history.

A continuing debate within international law research is whether there is an emerging international constitutional order. This journal devoted an issue to this discussion and there have been a number of books and articles written on the subject. Indeed, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has recently joined the debate by writing an essay entitled (in the English translation) ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?’ The essay reminds the reader of constitutionalism's original philosophical roots in Kantian cosmopolitanism. Habermas argues that the world dominated by nation-states ‘is indeed in transition towards the postnational constellation of a global society’. He contrasts this vision with the realist opinion that the taming of political power through law is only possible within a sovereign state and with a more recent view postulating a vision of a liberal world order under the banner of Pax Americana. In support of the Habermas position, it can be argued that as a result of the UN 60th Anniversary Summit's adoption of the international norm of ‘the responsibility to protect’, there is a trend towards constitutional values in our international system. As Anne Peters states, ‘[t]he most fundamental norms might represent global constitutional law.’