The articles in this issue of the Leiden Journal of International Law (LJIL), on the life and work of Alejandro Álvarez, comprise the first in a series of occasional special issues planned for the LJIL, each of which will focus on the work of a leading international legal scholar from the ‘periphery’. In launching the Periphery Series, the editorial board of the LJIL had in mind the goal of focusing attention on the role played by centre–periphery dynamics in international law. The centre–periphery formulation of international affairs owes its provenance to political economy, in which context it is primarily associated with dependency theory, Immanuel Wallerstein's world systems theory, and more recently, Paul Krugman's model of the geography of trade economics. In part, the Periphery Series invites scholars to confront questions of resource allocation, dependency, and geography highlighted by those bodies of work. In addition, however, this series seeks to foster wider engagement with the discursive function of centre–periphery oppositions in international law, in their many and various iterations.

Alejandro Álvarez's professional trajectory forces us to rethink the traditional modes of reading and writing the history of international law. Álvarez was central to the development of modern international law. He also happened to be a Latin American international lawyer. Should we interpret his work and life against the background of the intellectual and political history of Europe? Are the contexts that relate to the crisis of the European balance of power or the rise of nationalism the only ones that explain the emergence of a modern international legal discourse? This article situates Álvarez's scholarship within the intellectual, economic, and political history of Latin America. Interpreting Álvarez in the context of a genealogy of modernist Latin American thinkers illustrates the extent to which his work was part of a broader regional effort to appropriate European cultural artefacts in ways that granted them both a cosmopolitan and a distinctively Latin American character. Álvarez's modernism reinvented the meaning and uses of international law as a strategic foreign-policy tool in the interest of Latin American countries, a reinterpretation that contributed also to the construction of a Latin American identity and thought.

This essay focuses on Alejandro Álvarez's seminal article, ‘Latin America and International Law’, published in 1909 in the American Journal of International Law. Offering and in-depth analysis of the text, it foregrounds the strategic meaning of Álvarez's work in the light of the international politics of his day. It posits that, more than simply a diplomatic history of Latin American particularity, Álvarez presents the case for a different hemispheric international order, based on an ‘American international law’ extending to the United States. He draws primarily an Latin American Precedents – based on historical and stituational commonalities – to argue for a common public law. He then grafts an idiosyncratic interpretation of the Monroe Doctrine as the United States' main contribution to this common law, as well as the fact of US sponsorship of various Americas-wide conferences resulting in the ratification of regional treaties. Notably, and this is one of the main points of this is one of the main points of this essay, Álvarez elevates certain Latin American states as leaders in regional international law and capable agents of its enforcement across the hemisphere. In short, this essay advances the claim that Álvarez's project of pan-American law in effect entreats the United States to share its hegemony and wield its power in the region jointly with Latin America's ‘better-constituted’ states.

This article, focusing on Alejandro Álvarez's Le droit international américain (1910), locates Álvarez in his second home, Paris, within the French sociological/historical school of ‘solidarist’ legal thought. Álvarez's book provides a heroic image of Latin America developing its own regional international law away from the decadent forces of Europe and making significant contributions to international law generally. To tell his story, Álvarez also highlights the dark side of his native continent, in part to sell Álvarez as a practitioner of a bold method. Álvarez adopts racial hierarchy as part of his explanatory model, displaying the tendency of Latin Americans of Spanish descent to identify with and distance themselves from the metropole while separating themselves from the ‘other’. And despite the progressive manifesto rhetoric of the book and its claims for the Latin American role, the substance of Álvarez's international law was ultimately fairly domesticated for his French audience.

The long life of Alejandro Álvarez, the most renowned Latin American international legal scholar of the twentieth century, was dedicated to the persistent promotion of projects of a continental (American), regional (Latin American), and universal international law. This article undertakes an overview of his oeuvre through a reading of Álvarez's work as coming from a criollo (or Creole) and social legal consciousness presented through the three consistent tropes of renewal, reform, and rupture. Although much of Álvarez's work has been forgotten, during his lifetime he generated profound admiration and even a school of thought, but also rejection and ridicule on both sides of the Atlantic. Álvarez may be considered a scholar from the ‘periphery’ because of his country of origin and regionalist claims, but his life and works show that he was also at the forefront of the leading issues and institutions of international law in the first half of the twentieth century.

Judge Alejandro Álvarez had already developed a theory of a ‘new international law’ when he joined the first bench of the International Court of Justice in 1946. During his time at the Court, he elucidated his theory by means of Individual or Dissenting Opinions, always stressing the importance of the Court for judicial lawmaking. The aim of this article is to present Álvarez's concept of a ‘new international law’ and to analyse some of his individual and dissenting opinions with respect to his theory, with additional emphasis on the lawmaking function of the Court as an integral part of his approach.

The present article aims to examine a set of legal constructions related to the concept of legal title in territorial disputes. Any international jurist cannot but strongly feel the need of a theoretical approach and framework explaining the acquisition and loss of territorial sovereignty. This conceptualization will be put to the test in the light of the ICI's case law, especially, but not exclusively, the most recent ones. To this end, the article is structured in three main parts in addition to introduction: the first will be devoted to the building of a comprehensive concept of territorial title while rejecting the traditional ‘modes of acquisition’ of territorial sovereignty (part 2). Part 3 will deal with the legal processes through which territorial titles are actually created, extinguished, or modified: roughly speaking, this happens by an international agreements (legal acts) or by virtue of norm-creating facts. Last, but not least, we shall examine – in part 4 – the highly debated and sensitive topic of the relations between effectiveness and formal legal title from the standpoint of the establishment or loss of territorial sovereignty. As we have endeavoured to show in this writing the concept of legal title reunites and resolves the tension between fact (effectiveness) and formal gegal title (law). In this respect four situations will be put under scrutiny in order ultimately to test our construction of a new concept of territorial title.

In certain quarters of the former Yugoslavia, the ICTY judgment issued on 30 June 2006 in Prosecutor v. Naser Orić has been strongly criticized for meting out a two-year prison sentence to the Bosnian Muslim wartime commander of Srebrenica. After a short sketch of the factual background which the trial chamber considered to be the pivotal sentencing factor, this note focuses on the legal issues underlying his conviction for having failed to prevent the murder and cruel treatment of a number of Serb prisoners. In particular, the trial chamber's interpretation of the standard of ‘reason to know’ of these crimes deserves attention. The judgment also gave rise to other significant developments, such as the approach to repeated prosecutorial violations of its disclosure obligations and an important clarification regarding the scope and nature of crimes committed by subordinates of a superior.

The article analyses the main features of the Statute of the International Criminal Court in the context of recent developments in international law. The core submission is made that the states' obligations enshrined in the Statute (namely, to investigate and prosecute the most heineous crimes, and to co-operate with the Court in their investigation and prosecution) are to be construed as obligations erga omnes. Since ending impunity for such crimes transcends the interests of individual states, the Court should act on behalf of the international community in remedying any shortcomings of states' action in this respect. In this perspective, particular attention is devoted to the principle of complementarity: it is argued that it could and should be construed and implemented in such a way as genuinely to allow the achievement of the universal objective of preventing impunity for those crimes of concern to the international community.

Although the House of Lords has now made it clear that evidence obtained by means of torture conducted abroad by non-UK nationals is inadmissible in judicial proceedings in the United Kingdom, the position remains unsatisfactory. Restrictive approaches have been taken to many of the key issues, suggesting that there is still considerable scope for the use of evidence which is brought to light as a result of forms of ill-treatment which violate human rights standards. Moreover, the use of ‘foreign torture evidence’ by the executive is expressly sanctioned. Even if this strikes an appropriate balance between conflicting goals of public safety and judicial propriety, it cannot be said to further the realization of the international prohibition of torture and inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and is a poor reflection of the abhorrence of torture which the House of Lords itself says is a feature of domestic common law.

Books and Articles in the Field of the Prevention and Peaceful Settlement of International Disputes (Summer 2006)

Compiled by Ingrid Kost exclusively from materials available in the Peace Palace Library, The Hague

Ian Balfour and Eduardo Cadava (eds.) And Justice for All?: The Claims of Human Rights, Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2004, ISBN 0822365642, 440 pp., $20.00 (pb).

Roger Brownsword (ed.), Global Governance and the Quest for Justice, Volume 4: Human Rights, Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2005, ISBN 1841134090, 225 pp., £22.95 (pb).

Simon Caney, Justice beyond Borders: A Global Political Theory, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2005, ISBN 019829350X, 319 pp., £24.99 (pb).