Global warming is perhaps the ultimate crisis for humanity. But is it a crisis for international law? How has crisis framing and rhetoric influenced the development of international climate change law? Elements of a ‘crisis model’ can be identified in international responses to climate change, but they have transcended it and are evolving in much more complex and textured ways. On the one hand, the continuous pressure for urgent and exceptional action at the multilateral level has led to acrimony between states, indifference and denial among important constituencies, and ultimately to weak arrangements within conventional intergovernmental models. This has produced an impression of constant failure, which in itself poses a challenge to the normative capacity of traditional international law-making. On the other hand, crisis framing has been a catalyst for developments in international law in unintended ways. It has legitimated ‘bottom-up’ approaches and sub-global and unilateral action, as well as localized legal responses. It has led to sophisticated yet plausible reconciliations between climate concerns and international trade. It has promoted reconsiderations of hard policy choices, such as between mitigation and adaptation. International law’s climate change agenda has broadened, not narrowed, and it has shown a considerable capacity to innovate and develop, presenting new opportunities for international law’s functions and modalities.

For some years the future of the International Court of Justice has been a matter of growing concern to supporters of international adjudication as a way of settling legal disputes between States. This concern has also made itself felt inside the Organization of the United Nations, where the review of the role of the Court was a standing item on the agenda of the General Assembly for a number of years until the adoption on 22 November 1974 of resolution 3232 (XXIX). In this resolution the General Assembly inter alia expressed its satisfaction with the Court's 1972 revision of its Rules, and called upon States to have recourse to the Court more often.

The focus of the article is on the activities of the European Union and the United Nations in the fields of peace and security, human rights and democracy. These represent not only crucial issues uniting both the EU and the UN in their external actions, but are also founded upon, or at least affected by, fundamental principles of international law. It is argued that a coherent strategy for achieving long term peace and stability in regional and international relations must be based on respect for these fundamental principles as well as rules of international law derived from these principles. Such principles are not just abstract legal constructs but are a reflection of the values that international actors – states, organisations and others – have held since the UN Charter ushered in a new world order in 1945. Situating both organisations within the international legal order should enhance the legitimacy and arguably the effectiveness of the two organisations whether they act singly or together. Increasingly, the activities of the EU and the UN overlap in matters of peace, security, human rights and democracy. This overlap has the potential to result in confrontation, as well as what would normally be aspired to – co-operation. It is therefore essential to identify the underlying principles and rules governing the organisations and their activities. It is argued that these principles and rules should be recognised and reinforced if we are to have organisational activity that is more than discretionary or arbitrary.

The European Community and the law of treaties together represent a rather vast topic, which can be approached from various angles. In this article, the topic will be studied from the angle of the law of treaties rather than that of Community law, and the reason is largely that recent developments in Community law shed an interesting perspective on the law of treaties.

In his search for ‘Self-contained regimes’ in the 1985 issue of the Netherlands Yearbook of International Law, Bruno Simma addressed diplomatic law, human rights law and the law of the European Community. He did not consider the most traditional of all ‘special branches’ of international law: the law of war. Although present-day authorities no longer see the modern law of armed conflict as a corpus of law seperate from international law, it is often still considered to be a lex specialis within international law. This special character – although certainly in certain areas still controversial – is notably predicated on the (traditionally) sharp distinction between the conditions of peace and war. Although war ‘in a technical sense’, to use Prof. Dinstein's term, has lost its prominence, if indeed it ever had much, the legal relevance of a distinction between war and peace, or armed conflict or not, is still recognised in international legal instruments as well as by many authors.

The events which provide the backdrop to the “Case concerning United States Diplomatic and Consular Staff in Tehran (United States of America v. Iran)” are clear and undisputed. They involve the violent occupation of the American Embassy in Tehran, and of the consulates in Tabriz and Shiraz. The occupation of the Embassy on 4 November 1979 led to the Embassy personnel and two other American citizens, a teacher and a businessman, being taking hostage, and subsequently to demands being addressed to America (e.g., for the extradition of the Shah and the return of his wealth) under the threat that failure to comply would result in the hostages being put on trial as spies.

Crisis has played a significant role in international environmental law since its inception. To some extent the field as a whole might be characterized as a ‘discipline of crisis’, since it functions as a counterbalance to unbridled pollution and resource depletion. On the other hand, there have been ongoing attempts to move away from a reactive focus on crisis and to conceptualize international environmental law as part of a broader societal shift toward sustainability. The dilemma that faces the discipline is that in the absence of a sense of crisis, we are unsure of how to generate the commitment that will be required to undertake fundamental changes to the status quo.

This chapter explores the footprint that temporary international legal regimes can leave on international law. Drawing on four different theories of state behaviour, it considers how temporary regimes can shape future permanent regimes. Under a rational design approach, temporary legal regimes influence future permanent regimes largely because they provide valuable experiences from which state actors learn. Under other theories of behaviour—historical institutionalism, constructivism, and behavioural international law—temporary legal regimes can have even more influence on permanent ones. Although these other three theories have important differences, all suggest that temporary regimes strongly shape the real and perceived possibilities for future permanent design choices. This chapter then looks at how these different theoretical approaches play out in case studies in refugee law, international criminal law, and international environmental law. While these case studies do not solely support any one theoretical account, collectively they demonstrate that temporary regimes can have outsized influence on permanent ones. This in turn has important implications for negotiators involved in regime design.

A crucial aspect of international law is to provide long-term stability and legal certainty. This function presumes that international law-making creates discrete norms and institutions that remain static until they are changed (or replaced) by other discrete institutions. This paper adopts a different point of departure to think about ‘temporariness’. It suggests a dynamic of norm creation and institutional change in global governance. Neither norms nor institutions remain static once they become ‘permanent’. They adapt, evolve and transform. This contribution argues that this process of change is driven by interaction among institutions and actors, which is the default technology of post-national rule-making. How to start thinking about such interaction? What is the added value of focusing on the process of interaction and not on the allegedly static characteristics of actors themselves? How can this approach provide a different normative and critical framework to think about debates on global governance? In answering these questions, this chapter will explore the interaction between international institutions in order to develop the central tenets of a methodology to think about institutional change in post-national rule-making.

On 26 March 1986 the procedure of parliamentary approval of the so-called Cruise-missile Treaty between the Netherlands and the United States was concluded by a vote of approval by the First Chamber (Senate) of Parliament. Earlier, on 27 February 1986, the Second Chamber, after protracted debate, had given its approval. On 20 May 1986 the District Court of The Hague declared itself incompetent to hear a case brought by the ‘Stichting Verbiedt de Kruisraketten’ [Foundation for the Prohibition of Cruise Missiles, hereinafter FPCM] against the State of the Netherlands.

If the trading system of the 21st century is to succeed in ‘raising standards of living, ensuring full employment and a large and steadily growing volume of real income and effective demand, and expanding the production and trade in goods and services … in accordance with the objective of sustainable development’, it must be equipped to achieve these goals.

East Timor will soon achieve full independence and statehood. Its initial concerns as a newly independent state are political and economic stability. The current UN presence in East Timor should help ensure that the former concern is addressed so that the transition from a war torn non self-governing territory to a democratically elected government proceeds as smoothly as possible. The latter concern over East Timor's future economic stability is currently tied-up with continuing negotiations over the division of oil and gas revenues derived from a joint development arrangement, namely the Timor Gap Zone of Co-operation Treaty. This bilateral treaty was initially agreed in 1989 between Indonesia, which controlled East Timor from 1975 to 1999, and Australia. Its terms are currently being enforced on a provisional basis as agreed between the United Nations Transitional Administration of East Timor (UNTAET) and Australia while its future is being negotiated.

On 30 June 1995 the International Court of Justice delivered its Judgment in the East Timor case. The dispute before the Court involved proceedings instituted by Portugal against Australia in 1991 because of the conclusion of the so-called Timor Gap Treaty of 1989 between Australia and Indonesia. The Treaty concerns the joint exploitation of the continental shelf lying between the territory of East Timor and the northern coast of Australia (the so-called Timor Gap). Portugal asserted its position as the administering power of East Timor and claimed that Australia should have concluded and implemented the joint exploitation treaty with it rather than Indonesia.

The disappearance of the Third Reich from the international scene and the emergence of two German States was accomplished by such unorthodox means that the literature on the subject often resorts to the qualification “sui generis” when describing situations and facts, for which there are no precedents. Furthermore, the legal problems connected with the status of the German Democratic Republic (G.D.R.) and the Federal Republic of Germany (F.R.G.) are so closely related to the development of political relations in Europe, that they cannot be considered in isolation from political elements.

Hans Kelsen is undoubtedly among the foremost jurists of this century. Roscoe Pound, himself not an insubstantial figure in the field, considered him “un questionably the leading jurist of the time”. Kelsen occupied himself in particular with three branches of law: constitutional law, legal philosophy, and international law.

In Article 5 of the Paris Peace Treaty of 30 May 1814 the Contracting Parties agreed to establish a regime of free navigation on the Rhine, at the same time giving a mandate to the forthcoming Congress of Vienna to establish similar navigation regimes for other rivers “which, in their navigable course, separate or traverse different States”. This idea was given substance in the definition of the international regime in the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna of 9 June 1815. Article 108, in particular, speaks of States “separated or traversed by the same navigable river”, while Article 109 provides that “the navigation of the rivers, along their whole course, referred to in the preceding article, from the point where each of them becomes navigable, to its mouth, shall be entirely free … ” So, the application of the rules of free navigation is dependent upon two criteria: the first, of a physical character, is that the water-course possesses by reason of its natural conditions the technical qualities summarized in the word “navigability”. The seond, of a political character, is the condition that the water-course borders on or passes through more than one State. But, in conformity with the basic idea of the Act of Vienna, which regulates the navigation of rivers on the basis of the community of interests of the riparians, for a waterway to be governed by this Act it is necessary that one and the same section of it fulfils both criteria. Consequently, a water-course, the non-navigable upper course of which traverses one State while the whole of its navigable course is in the territory of another State, is not covered by the Act of Vienna.

Since the Council of Europe was established in 1949, more than forty conventions and agreements between Member States have been concluded within its framework, relating entirely or in part, directly or indirectly, to aliens. Usually these conventions and agreements concern nationals of the contracting parties only. Sometimes, as is particularly the case with the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and its Five Protocols, all aliens within the jurisdiction of a Member State are covered, regardless of their nationality.

There are very few cases in which India has been a party to litigation before foreign courts on the question of sovereign immunity.