Cultural property has always been a target in armed conflicts. Even with the development of a regime for the protection of cultural property in armed conflict, such destructions continue to be a reality in contemporary armed conflicts. The effectiveness of this regime comes thus into question. This chapter aims to analyse a case study on the application of this regime: the Preah Vihear Temple case. During a fifty-five-year border dispute between Cambodia and Thailand in the area where the Temple is situated, several international forums have been seized with the protection of the Temple, including: the International Court of Justice (ICJ), United Nations Security Council (UNSC), UNESCO and a Joint Border Commission established by Cambodia and Thailand. This chapter will assess the contribution of all of these processes and agencies to the protection of cultural property in armed conflict regarding this study.

The Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) is essential for nuclear disarmament and world peace. This chapter compares three dispute-settling mechanisms in the NPT legal complex using the Iran Nuclear Deal (JCPOA) as an example: political measures, non-compliance mechanisms (NCMs), and international courts and tribunals (ICTs). It evaluates the value of each mechanism to ensure Iran’s compliance with its commitments. The discussion includes NCMs like the JCPOA and the UN Security Council regimes and ICT proceedings like ICJ (International Court of Justice) and CJEU (Court of Justice of the European Union). Fact-finding processes at the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) are also emphasized. Finally, the relevance of these models for climate change, environmental protection, and creating a Middle East Weapons of Mass Destruction Free Zone is discussed.

The preface opens the book with a commentary on the organic relationship shared between the United Nations Organization and the question of Palestine. It does so through a brief discussion of the 1948 Reparations Case, in which the International Court of Justice affirmed the international legal personality of the United Nations arising from the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte, the United Nations Mediator for Palestine

Under international law, occupation is meant to be temporary and occupying powers cannot be sovereign in the territory they occupy. In contrast, since 1967 Israel has systematically altered the status of the OPT with the aim of annexing it, de facto or de jure. During this time, though the UN has focused on documenting the legality of a range of individual violations of international law by the occupying power, scant attention has been paid by the Organization to the legality of the occupation regime as a whole. Emphasis has instead been placed on encouraging the parties to bring the occupation to an end through continued, though widely discredited, bilateral negotiations. By what rationale can it be said that Israels occupation remains either legal or legitimate in the absence of good faith on its part in negotiating the occupation’s end? How can its end reasonably be made contingent on negotiations between occupier and occupied? This chapter argues that the UN’s failure to take a more principled position on the very legality of Israel’s half-century ‘temporary’ occupation of the self-determination unit of the Palestinian people is demonstrative of the maintenance of Palestine’s legal subalternity in the UN system, under a different guise.

The postscript concludes with a discussion of General Assembly resolution 77/246 of 30 December 2022, passed while this book was entering production. The resolution requests the International Court of Justice for an advisory opinion on the legal status of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory in line with the research presented in Chapter 5. As the opinion of the Court is to be given after the publication of the book, this update looks to this recent development as the latest attempt by Palestine to resort to the counter-hegemonic potential of international law with results as yet unknown

This chapter examines the history and nature of the Security Council’s relationship with the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the role that this relationship may play in the exercise of the Council’s functions. It briefly recalls the drafting history pertaining to the Court, including its relationship to the Council, the UN Charter provisions governing the relationship between the two principal organs, and the relationship between them – both potentially and in practice. It concludes that a more prominent role for the Court, within the confines set by the Council itself in this context, could strengthen the effectiveness and legitimacy of the Council as an institution. Under the framework set out in the UN Charter and considering the Council’s wide discretion as to how it executes its responsibilities, the Council could and may want to consider and make use of the ICJ as a useful tool within its diverse toolbox for the maintenance of international peace and security.

This chapter analyses India’s challenges to jurisdiction before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) in 2014 and 2015, comparing the implications of the bodies’ differing procedures and perceptions of their own jurisdiction, and assessing the international relations dynamics at hand. In the Nuclear Zero and Enrica Lexie cases, high-profile matters of lethal weight were repeatedly held hostage by conflicting understandings of jurisdiction. India’s relationship with international jurisdiction, and especially its respective success and failure challenging ICJ and ITLOS jurisdiction, demonstrate how ITLOS procedure is designed to (and successfully does) cabin jurisdictional challenges in interstate disputes. After exploring the courts’ jurisdictional procedure in design and experience, this chapter offers reflections on the impact of the procedural variances, and future implications for states’ behaviour challenging jurisdiction – both for rising powers, who may wish to follow India’s example exerting status in nuanced embrace of international jurisdiction, and for major powers such as the United States, which in time may have to engage international courts if it cannot neutralise the decline of the status which allows it to broadly reject ICJ jurisdiction in state-to-state disputes.

This chapter identifies an evolving trend in the ICJ’s engagement with science, which has started with the marginalization of scientific evidence, continued with making superficial evidentiary assessments, but ultimately demonstrated an increasing willingness to engage with science. As to framing techniques, mandating the parties’ negotiations in science-intensive questions, the prevalence of finding procedural breaches as well as decoupling the notion of ’risk’ from substantive, scientific criteria will be discussed. In terms of fact-finding, the chapter addresses evolving procedures for taking expert evidence, and applicable standards of proof. The causal analysis evidences the Court’s struggle with establishing the requisite proof in cases of uncertain causation. As to the standard and extent of review, the study examines the reasonableness test, and defends the majority's solution in the Whaling in the Antarctic case based on insights from Science and Technology Studies.

This chapter investigates and compares the attitudes that two different types of dispute settlement bodies dealing with international economic law – investment arbitration tribunals and the WTO Panels and Appellate Body – exhibit towards the decisions of other international adjudicators. Firstly, all the cases citing external precedents are mapped –employing citation and network analysis techniques – to identify the most cited courts and decisions and which issue areas prompt recourse to external precedent. Secondly, the author assesses the importance in identifying guiding precedents of factors such as: the legal regime, the factual matrix, the quality of the decision’s reasoning, and the reputation of the adjudicators that rendered it. Thirdly, he considers whether the invocation of external precedent might pursue goals going beyond the ones traditionally identified in the literature. Finally, the author compares the ways in which external precedent are currently employed by trade and investment adjudicators under a systemic perspective.

Jessup’s Transnational Law challenges the state as the sole maker of international law. Nevertheless, the doctrine of transnational law advocated for the disrobing of the newly gained sovereignty in Asia and Africa. American corporate lawyers used transnational law to expand their international commercial arbitration practice. Next, in disputes arising from the expropriations by new states of property acquired from concession contracts investors found transnational law profitable. Effectively, Transnational Law, restoring a colonial status quo, facilitated the post-war internationalization of contracts to develop the law of economic protection of aliens. It wantonly focused far too much on “contracts” forgetting conveniently its “concessional” nature. The doctrine of transnational law grew from the McNair-Lauterpacht School of thought that “exploited ungrudgingly and to the full” the “rules” of “private law for the purpose of the development of international law”. The Suez crisis inaugurated the American lawyer's putting of transnational law into practice.

This chapter is concerned with exploring the mutually constitutive character of the international law of nuclear weapons, and the Cold War and post–Cold War environs in which that law was to be developed. In one direction it is argued that a consensual treaty-based system of law-making prevailed during the Cold War, which shifted to a system of Security Council legislation in the post-Cold War era, and that this reflected a parallel shift from a multipolar to a unipolar geopolitics. In another direction, however, it is also argued that the international law of nuclear weaponry also contributed to the production of its own political environs by both legitimating the possession of nuclear weaponry and controlling its spread.

I argue that the (often idiosyncratic) interventions of Pakistan’s diplomats and international lawyers in Kashmir, Jammu and Pashtunistan, as well as in Bandung and Havana, form a distinct legal and political trajectory, which is at odds with the arbitrary, yet ubiquitous, conceptual delineations between ‘cold’ and ‘warm’ wars. Far from being peripheral to global Cold War developments, Pakistan’s internal and international relations and troubles provide a rich source of strategies and ideas about the state, law and society in the Third World. They are, however, also a testament to the centrality of class struggle in a post-colony – a struggle, exemplified in the events of 1951, that no lawfare could bring to an end.