In the 2007 Government Memorandum to Parliament entitled Human dignity for all. A human rights strategy for foreign policy, the Netherlands Minister for Foreign Affairs, Maxime Verhagen, examined the interrelationship between human rights, peace and security. In this context, the Minister also addressed the relationship between counter-terrorism strategies and international law, specifically human rights instruments and international humanitarian law. The Minister referred to the Oud-Poelgeest seminar of April 2007 and announced further initiatives in this field. In a subsequent Plan of Action, Minister Verhagen specified the ways in which the Dutch government sought to implement the Human Rights Strategy in the field of combating terrorism. Among the concrete policy measures to be taken featured the initiation of a Follow-up Process to the Oud-Poelgeest project.

This article deals with the recent Al-Jedda House of Lords judgment from the point of view of public international law. Mr Al-Jedda unsuccessfully sought a remedy under the Human Rights Act against his prolonged internment without charge or trial in a British prison in Iraq. The article provides an in depth analysis of the opinions delivered by their Lordships. It advances some criticism of the line of reasoning adopted. Despite reaching the right result, the distinguishing arguments employed by the House to eschew the controversial Behrami case by the European Court of Human Rights seem unconvincing. Secondly, the decision that Article 5 ECHR was ‘qualified and/or displaced’ was an inherently ambiguous one. It left too many questions open as to the law applicable to Mr Al-Jedda's internment, some of which this article seeks to clarify.

Egypt and Sudan's reluctance to share the Nile waters with the remaining riparian states has soured relations between them. The downstream countries base their claims on historical legal rights embodied in the 1929 and 1959 Nile Waters Agreements. Past efforts to enhance regional cooperation such as the Nile Basin Initiative and the Cooperative Framework Agreement (between the upstream countries) did not appear to significantly improve their relations. However, the legal and political situation has recently changed: South Sudan's independence from Sudan on 9 July 2011, the outbreak of civil turmoil in Egypt on 25 January 2011 leading to the fall of Mubarak, and the unilateral start of the construction of the Grand Millennium Dam (GMD) by Ethiopia at the beginning of April 2011. This paper sets out to address the following question: Do these recent changes create an opportunity to incorporate a more equitable sharing of the waters in the Nile Basin legal regime? It examines how the new changes may affect the existing legal debates on the validity of the Nile Agreements, state succession given that Sudan has split into two nations, whether Ethiopia is bound by the 1902 Agreement to notify planned measures and whether the new GMD gives expression to the implementation of the equity principle. It concludes that there is some hope for a more equitable sharing of the Nile waters given the recent legal and political changes.

This article focuses on the role and contribution of the International Court of Justice to developing and interpreting the right of peoples to self-determination. The most relevant cases decided by the Court so far, and briefly noted here, broadly fall within the decolonization context, save for the ongoing advisory proceedings in the Kosovo case. This simple taxonomy is based on a wide separation of the Court's case law in two main categories, namely decolonization and secession. The analysis of the place of secession under current international law serves to put into perspective the inquiry into whether any of the main principles applicable to the decolonization process, as elaborated by the Court, continue to be valid in the case of secession of a part of a state from an existing independent state. The article ends with a number of concluding remarks on the contribution of the Court to clarifying the right of peoples to self-determination as part of the corpus of international human rights law.

The constantly increasing pressure on the environment caused by the transboundary effects of human activities has posed the problem of defining the limits beyond which such transboundary deleterious effects become legally relevant under international law, giving rise to interstate claims of a compensatory, preventive or procedural nature. The abstract characterization of a certain intensity of transboundary environmental interference by using such attributes as ‘serious’, ‘appreciable’, ‘significant’, ‘considerable’, etc., has become an important method of describing that threshold. It is used in State practice mostly in rules of a general character – often in the absence of or in addition to specific environmental quality standards, limits or prohibitions. It plays a major role in defining the scope of the emerging rule of general international law prohibiting ‘significant’ transboundary environmental harm.

For the first time in more than thirty years, no doubt due to a fresh wave of genocidal warfare in Europe, the likelihood of the establishment of a permanent International Criminal Court has re-emerged. One of the crimes with which the proposed jurisdiction of the Court is to be conferred is the international crime of aggression.

This article examines the centrality of domestic location in transitional justice, using the example of the removal of the Charles Taylor trial from the Special Court for Sierra Leone's base in Freetown to The Hague to illustrate what is lost when trials are removed from the survivor population. While transitional criminal trials are usually justified on the basis of their ability to herald the return of the rule of law, the emergence of hybrid courts and the principle of complementarity demonstrate a growing realisation that purely international paradigms of transitional justice do little to normalise court processes that are at the core of the rule of law. This article argues that the transfer defeats the distinctive rule of law reconstruction potential of hybrid courts which emphasizes the integration of local staff and voices into the transitional justice process to make it more relevant to the survivor community and to inculcate international norms and practice. It does so for two reasons. Firstly, the transfer of the trial from the local population impairs the suggested ability of hybrid courts to legitimize the idea of resolving disputes through the domestic courts. Secondly, the removal risks undoing positive advances made in earlier SCSL trials by compounding the local perception that these advances are the product of international dominance of the court, and in the process undermines local confidence that these advances are sustainable or applicable domestically. Though the Taylor removal was arguably unavoidable, cataloguing what has been lost will be of relevance in future when decisions about the location of a trial are made under the ICC's complementarity regime.

On 17 February 1983, a new revised Constitution (Grondwet) entered into force for the Netherlands. It did not bring about radical changes and left the constitutional structure essentially unchanged. Because they may serve as a framework for the later analysis of the revised provisions on foreign relations, some of these lasting features will be outlined here.

It may be commonplace to state that the world will never be the same as it was before 11 September 2001. Yet, it is obvious that the magnitude and audacity of the horrifying events of that day have presented international terrorism in an unprecedented way, namely as a real and potentially catastrophic threat to human security and international peace. This raises the question with regards to the role of international law, and to what extent current public international law provides an adequate framework for combating international terrorism. Are further development and adaptation of principles and rules of international law necessary to deal more effectively with the threat of terrorist attacks and with those who do not play by these rules? These issues will be addressed in section 2 of this article.

The United Nations and African Union agreed, late 2006, on conducting a hybrid operation in Darfur, in a remarkable turnaround from the UN's quest to deploy an autonomous force, which, it was anticipated, would take over the African Mission in Sudan (AMIS). This agreement was formalised by Resolution 1769 adopted on 31 July 2007, establishing the United Nations African Union Mission in Darfur (UNAMID). In addition to discussing the various implications of the proposed hybrid operation on the law of peacekeeping and collective security law, this article examines the individual response of the AU and UN to the crisis. It investigates the factors that dictated the AMIS's tepid mandate, and argues that the UN's quest for the Sudan's consent, as a precondition for deploying UNAMID was unnecessary, and that the United Nations Mission in Sudan (UNMIS)'s original mandate provides a solid legal basis for enforcing the will of the international community in Darfur.

International law developed originally as a body of norms concerning, and for the benefit of, States and governments. The protection of the rights of the individual was of secondary concern in its early history. Even today, most of its basic premises, rules and principles are still shaped by the inter-State system characterising contemporary international relations. However, in modern times, there has been rising global insistence that States, governments, institutions and laws exist to serve the people and there is a persistent, universal outcry for the human rights and fundamental freedoms of the individual to be respected and assured. The human factor is emerging, at last, as the factor which should govern in every situation. With this objective in mind, the norms of international law are coming under persistent scrutiny from the point of view of whether they are conducive to the promotion and protection of the rights of the individual. And where the law has not yet developed responses for dealing with problems, old or new, affecting the rights of the individual, the international community expects of it that it should quickly show its capacity for imaginativeness and innovation and that it should demonstrate its ability to discharge its basic function: respecting, ensuring and advancing the dignity and rights of individuals throughout the world.

Multilateral treaties play an increasingly important role in the structure and process of present-day international law. They have proved to be a flexible, ‘multi-purpose’ instrument for finding a common denominator to the interests of a growing number of States and co-ordinating the international effort for dealing with global problems facing mankind. There is a growing awareness that the traditional bilateralist approach is inadequate for the solution of problems such as the maintenance of international peace and security, ensuring world-wide respect for human rights, democratizing international economic relations, preserving the human environment, etc. These problems generate ‘community interests’ on a global and regional level and require co-ordinated multilateral efforts for their solution.

The purpose of this article is to compare the International Criminal Court with the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia from a structural and procedural perspective and to comment upon some of the content of the ICC Statute and Rules from the experience of the ICTY. The ICTY is the first tribunal established for the purpose of punishing violations of international humanitarian law since the post World War II trials and is a unique case study in the realm of international criminal justice. It is also the first criminal tribunal set up under Chapter VII of the United Nations Charter (a technique utilised subsequently in setting up tribunals to deal with Rwanda and possibly Sierre Leone) and has been granted broad powers of drafting and amending its own Rules of Procedure and Evidence, which is something that sets it aside from other criminal jurisdictions, including the ICC.

The aim of this paper, in keeping with the theme of this jubilee issue, is to examine the private international law concept of public policy in its temporal dimension. The two main parts of the paper will discuss, in Part 2, the meaning and role of public policy, and, in Part 3, the impact of the ‘time element’ on public policy. This latter subject includes a discussion of both the point in time as of which public policy is applied, and of the way in which the values embodied in public policy change over the years. Part 4 will briefly note the way in which the concept itself, as distinct from the values that give it content, is evolving. For the most part my discussion is from the perspective of Anglo-Canadian private international law, and its counterparts in other British Commonwealth countries, because that is the system (they can be treated broadly as one system) with which I am most familiar. I will refer as well to sources in the United States and elsewhere to illustrate certain points, but neither space nor time have permitted a truly comparative study.

This article examines the proposal that, in order to overcome the comparative law problem of diverse national positions in relation to corporate criminal liability, a scheme involving administrative or civil liability should be adopted if corporations are to be included in the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court. It is argued that, despite the obvious practical appeal of such a solution, a criminal liability scheme should be preferred as perpetrators of international crimes – both natural and legal – should be subject to the full expressive and stigmatising capacities of the criminal law. However, recent international developments in corporate liability suggest a possible middle ground that may provide an acceptable solution to a majority of states.

The purpose of this article is to add a few glosses to some of the provisions of the Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC; Court), dealing with the relationship between it and the United Nations (UN) Security Council (UNSC).

This article is designed to provide a critical analysis of the successes and failures of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in certain key areas of international trade during its first decade. The WTO, which came into existence on 1 January 1995, celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2005, with the WTO officials claiming that the past ten years had been a success for the organization. Indeed, it has seen an expansion of its activities in recent years and has thus become one of the most important international organizations. Nearly 150 states, developed and developing, small and big, powerful and weaker, have now become members of this organization. Towards the end of 2005 a major WTO agreement, the TRIPS, was amended in favour of public health and full liberalization of trade in textile and clothing also became a reality in 2005.

However, the WTO, established as it was primarily to further liberalize international trade, is supposed to create a level playing field in a number of other key areas, including agriculture, in order for it to enable nations to compete on an equal footing across the board. Has the WTO lived up to its expectations over the past ten years? Has the level playing field become truly level in all major areas over the past decade? After examining these questions in some detail, this article argues that the WTO has limited success in some of the core areas and the playing field has not become as level as it should have been by the time it entered its second decade. The Doha Development Round of multilateral trade negotiations, which began in 2001, has not made any substantial progress.

The Sixth Ministerial Conference held in Hong Kong in December 2005, the closing month of the tenth anniversary of the WTO, failed to make a breakthrough. Although the failure in Hong Kong was not as disastrous as was in the third conference in Seattle in 1999 or in the fifth conference in Cancun in 2003, the deadlock witnessed in Hong Kong, especially with regard to the liberalization of trade in agriculture, has put the WTO itself at a crossroads. Since the Hong Kong meeting a series of deadlines for various stages of negotiations for moving the Doha Round negotiations forward have been missed. A formal meeting on 1 July 2006 of the Trade Negotiations Committee, which comprises the entire WTO membership, resulted in a failure. The WTO members could not agree on formulas for reducing tariffs and subsidies, various flexibilities, and other disciplines, especially on the liberalization of trade in agriculture. Achieving a truly level playing field should be about balancing the interests of various groups of states as well as the respective environments and interests of different traders and consumers living in different countries and the WTO has a long way to go to achieve this objective.

Over recent years the recruitment of child soldiers has become a matter of increasing international concern. There appear to be two reasons for this growth of concern. First, an increase in the use of child soldiers. Second, a change in society's perception of when childhood ends.