The requirements that an insured disclose all facts material to a transaction as well as not misrepresent material facts in the formation of an insurance contract are universal requirements of insurance law.1 The nature and extent of these obligations varies from one jurisdiction to the next but the fundamental justification for the duty to provide accurate information rests upon the perceived asymmetry of information as between insurer and insured as to the risk to be transferred.2 Disclosure in the insurance context is distinct from the general approach in commercial contracts, and in others between persons dealing at arm's length. Historically, the requirement to affirmatively volunteer information in relation to insurance transactions reflects, first, the potentially mortal impact inadequate information poses to the insurance industry's vitality, and second, the practical reality that certain critical information may be peculiarly within the insured's knowledge and difficult to elicit. The departure from caveat emptor and the allocation of the risk and consequences of non-disclosure to the party best placed to provide information pertinent to the transaction is seen as necessary to minimise transaction costs in such dealings.3

On 29 August 2013, the UK government published a memorandum setting out its ‘position regarding the legality of military action in Syria following the chemical weapons attack in Eastern Damascus on 21 August 2013’. While other States had contemplated some form of military action, most notably the US, none had been as clear and candid as to the legal basis upon which this would be launched. It might seem in this respect perhaps a little surprising that the UK decided in its relatively brief opinion that ‘the legal basis for military action would be humanitarian intervention’. As this article will attempt to highlight, this basic justification is far from uncontroversial. This short article will seek to be clear as to what the UK's legal position exactly was, whether and how this position can be reconciled with the lex lata governing the use of force for humanitarian purposes and its immediate impact upon it, and finally offer some reflections upon the contribution the opinion and its central legal argument has made to future legal argumentation in this area.

The European Union is soon to be composed of twenty-seven Member States. The first wave of enlargement is to take place in 2004 and may see the accession of Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, Slovenia, and the three Baltic states. A few years later, Bulgaria and Romania are also expected to join the EU. Although previous enlargements have taken place,2 the imminent accession of ten countries, mainly from Central and Eastern Europe, is unprecedented not only in terms of scale, but also for its political symbolism: for these states, EU membership confirms the success of their democratic and economic transition efforts and represents their (re-)integration to the European family after decades of isolation under the Soviet domination.

Access and benefit sharing (ABS) is a transactional mechanism designed to allow countries to trade access to their sovereign genetic resources for monetary and non-monetary benefits, with the ultimate goal of channelling those benefits into sustainable development and environmental conservation. Arguments about how pathogens are not the sort of genetic resources the world ought to conserve eventually gave way to a recognition that pathogens are indeed sovereign genetic resources under the Convention on Biological Diversity and its Nagoya Protocol, and that the ABS transaction may be an effective way to deliver scarce vaccines to developing nations as benefits received in exchange for shared pathogen samples. This article argues that categorising vaccines as benefits given in exchange for access to pathogen samples creates opposing incentives for providers and users of virus samples and undermines the human right to health because it makes that right a commodity to be bought. The provision of pathogen samples to the global research commons and the fair and equitable distribution of medicines should be two parallel public goods to be pursued as goals in and of themselves. We conclude that the linking of these goals through the ABS transaction should be reassessed.

The European Data Protection Directive 95/46/EC requires all European Economic Area (EEA) jurisdictions to provide an equivalent regime protecting the privacy and other fundamental rights and freedoms of natural persons in relation to personal data processing, whilst also shielding media expression from the default substantive requirements as necessary to ensure a balance between fundamental rights. Through a comprehensive coding of the derogations set out in each jurisdiction's data protection laws, this article provides the first systematic analysis of whether this has in fact been achieved. It is demonstrated that there is a total lack of even minimal harmonization in this area, with many laws providing for patently unbalanced results especially as regards the publication of sensitive information, which includes criminal convictions and political opinion, and the collection of information without notice direct from the data subject. This reality radically undermines European data protection's twin purposes of ensuring the free flow of personal data and protecting fundamental rights, an outcome which remains largely unaddressed by the proposed new Data Protection Regulation. Practical suggestions are put forward to ameliorate these troubling inconsistencies within the current process of reform.

In Case C–384/10 Jan Voogsgeerd v Navimer SA the ECJ dealt with a number of issues concerning the choice-of-law rules for employment contracts of the Rome Convention, most importantly the relationship between the connecting factors of the habitual place of work and the engaging place of business, and the interpretation of the latter connecting factor. After demonstrating that the ECJ has deprived it of almost any effect, that it leads to excessive legal uncertainty, unforeseeability of the outcome of litigation, and does not support the objectives of employee protection and proximity, this article concludes that the connecting factor of the engaging place of business should be abolished in European private international law.

On 23 September 2011, Mahmoud Abbas, in his capacity as the Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Palestine Liberation Organization and President of the State of Palestine, applied for full membership of the United Nations (UN) on behalf of the State of Palestine. In his letter of application (addressed to the UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon), Mr Abbas made reference to section F of the Plan of Partition in UN General Assembly Resolution 181(II) of 29 November 1947 (where sympathetic consideration of the application for membership of the UN of both the Arab and Jewish States was urged) as well as the Declaration of Independence of the State of Palestine of 15 November 1988 and the acknowledgement by the General Assembly (GA) of this Declaration in Resolution 43/177 of 15 December 1988.1

Complex multi-actors and multi-level governance structures have emerged in areas that were traditionally exclusively the preserve of the State and treaty-making. The adoption of the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (UNGP) affirmed a corporate responsibility to respect human rights to be implemented through human rights due diligence (HRDD), ie via management processes. The open-ended character of the UNGP generated the emergence of other soft instruments offering guidance to corporations in structuring HRDD. This contribution conceptualises the UNGP from the perspective of regulation as a principles-based exercise in polycentric governance reliant on regulatory intermediaries for interpretation. It then assesses the role of various sui generis normative instruments in providing interpretation to the UNGP and, how the presence of an additional layer of interpretative material contributes to the institutionalisation of responsible corporate conduct. The analysis of instruments drafted by international, non-governmental and business organisations reveals both a decentralising tension between different intermediaries due to disagreements and divergence concerning the precise extent of corporate human rights responsibilities, as well as attempts to centralise the interpretation of the UNGP. The article concludes by recommending some caution towards the employment of polycentric governance regimes and their lack of centralised interpretive authority in this domain of international law and suggests possible ways to formally establish centralised interpretation.

This contribution examines access to the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in the first decade of its operation. Compared with other regional human rights Courts over the corresponding period, the African Court has decided more contentious cases. Direct access accounts for this difference. Acceptance by States of optional direct access is a necessary but insufficient condition for actual access. The reasons for the Commission's reluctance to refer cases, which hampered indirect access to the Court, are investigated. Although the Court's advisory jurisdiction has found limited application, it has welcomed amici curiae and showed some acceptance of the role of original complainants before the Court.

During the COVID-19 pandemic the international community repeatedly called for the equitable distribution of vaccines and other medical countermeasures. However, there was a substantial gap between this rhetoric and State action. High-income countries secured significantly more doses than they required, leaving many low-income countries unable to vaccinate their populations. Current negotiations for the new Pandemic Treaty under the World Health Organization (WHO) attempt to narrow the gap between rhetoric and behaviour by building the concept of equity into the Treaty's substantive content. However, equity is difficult to define, much less to operationalize. Presently, WHO Member States appear to have chosen ‘access and benefit-sharing’ (ABS) as the predominant mechanism for operationalizing equity in the Treaty. This article examines ABS as a mechanism, its use in public health, and argues that ABS is fundamentally flawed, unable to achieve equity. It proposes other options for an equitable international response to future pandemic threats.

This article is an examination of the merits of permitting the exercise of party autonomy in choice of court and choice of law in respect of the personal and patrimonial aspects of adult relationships. It provides a commentary on the party autonomy provisions of EU harmonization instruments, actual and proposed, in family law. The treatment considers the particular issues of drafting which arise from the specialties of family law, and ponders whether or not the refinements required render the exercise of permitting party autonomy self-defeating.

The title of this article is not intended to disparage the value of freedom of speech in a modern democratic society. The right freely and publicly to criticise the institutions of government, the conduct of public affairs whether by the executive or Parliament, the freedom, indeed, to criticise the performance of the judiciary—that right is one of the glories of the unwritten constitution of this country. Its importance is constantly and forcefully emphasised in our highest courts. In one of the Spycatcher cases Lord Bridge of Harwich said that the right to freedom of speech is one of the fundamental freedoms essential to a free society.1 In the same case Lord Oliver quoted Blackstone's statement that the liberty of the press is essential to the nature of a free State.2 More recently Lord Goff of Chieveley, observing that he could see no inconsistency between English law and the European Convention on Human Rights in relation to freedom of speech, added: “This is scarcely surprising, since we may pride ourselves on the fact that freedom of speech has existed in this country perhaps as long as, if not longer than, it has existed in any other country in the world.”3

In its August 2019 decision in Portillo Cáceres v Paraguay, the Human Rights Committee recognised, for the first time, the existence of a connection between environmental protection and the right to life with dignity. This is not only a landmark decision for the Committee but also represents the consolidation of a body of case law and practice from the three regional human rights courts and other UN human rights bodies which has developed over the last quarter of a century. It also shows the potential of two important and widely debated paragraphs in the newly adopted General Comment No. 36 on the Right to Life, which describe environmental degradation as both an enabler of threats and a direct threat to the right to life. Such potential has been confirmed in another landmark decision of the HRC—Teitiota v New Zealand, relating to climate change as threat to life. This article draws on Portillo Cáceres v Paraguay and Teitiota v New Zealand to analyse this wider field of practice in order to clarify the connection between the right to life and environmental protection, as recognised by the Committee, and considers its potential impact on future litigation.

The Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance entered into force on 8 June 1991. Its purpose is to incorporate into the law of Hong Kong the provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (“the ICCPR”) as applied to Hong Kong. Being one of the first occasions where the ICCPR has been given direct legal force in a common law jurisdiction, the Hong Kong experience will provide an interesting case study on how an international human rights instrument is received and interpreted in domestic law. Indeed, shortly after the coming into operation of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights Ordinance, the late Professor Opsahl predicted that it would give the ICCPR, and by implication the Human Rights Committee, a potential impact on the Hong Kong domestic legal system which could hardly be expected in other countries. He even suggested that, in dealing with matters which the Human Rights Committee has not yet considered, the interpretation of the Hong Kong courts in applying the Bill of Rights may provide a useful supplement to international human rights law. The Bill of Rights Ordinance is now seven years old. This article will address two issues: first, the impact international and comparative jurisprudence has had on the interpretation of the Hong Kong Bill of Rights and, second, the contribution the Hong Kong jurisprudence on the Bill of Rights has or could have made to the development of international and comparative human rights law.

The government's decision, announced on 22 October 1993, to ratify the 1977 Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions of 1949 as soon as amendments to the Geneva Conventions Act 1957 could be made led to a race to pass the bill through all its stages in both Houses before 4 December 1995.1 This was the date of the International Conference of the Red Cross and Red Crescent held in Geneva and it was argued in the House of Lords that the British Red Cross should be able to attend the conference and to say that the necessary domestic legislation had been passed to enable ratification to take place. The bill had started its life in the House of Lords and had received its second reading only on 25 May 1995. It was, in fact, given the royal assent on 19 July 1995.