[…] risks and conflicts of interest can be overcome by rules of conduct adequate to the challenges of life if a conscious effort is made to foresee and counter the problems likely to emmerge.

The African Commission on Human and Peoples' Rights, which is mandated under the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights with promoting and protecting human rights in Africa, has attracted considerable criticism for being an ineffectual body. One of the complaints is that the Charter based regime lacks an effective system of remedies. This paper examines whether this criticism is justified. An analysis of the jurisprudence of the African Commission proves that the Commission is patiently constructing a concept of reparations which has some similarities with that developed by the UN Human Rights Committee.

The World Health Organization (WHO) had, among other things, been examining and deliberating the hazardous effects to health by the use of nuclear weapons. These discussions culminated in a resolution which requested an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the legality of the use of nuclear weapons in the following terms: [i]n view of the health and environmental effects, would the use of nuclear weapons by a Stare in war or other armed conflict be a breach of its obligations under international law including the WHO Constitution?

The present article describes the dispute settlement system of the Organization of the Islamic Conference through the envisaged creation of the International Islamic Court of Justice. The Court's Statute, adopted in 1987, considers the Islamic Shari'ah or Islamic law as the fundamental law to be applied by the Court for the resolution of international disputes. Therefore, the Court will have a religious character considering a local religious code as the primary applicable law. The International Islamic Court of Justice has not yet been set up. Its creation might have the effect of grouping Islamic states under the same international judicial system, and of causing a strong political impact in respect of the relations with the State of Israel and of the Palestinian question.

This essay recounts the protracted history of the proposal to create a UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, from the days of Cold War controversies and divisions until the post ultimately came into being after the World Conference on Human Rights (Vienna, 1993). While early proposals perceived the High Commissioner as an independent authority receiving complaints and lending good offices, the envisaged role of the High Commissioner progressively evolved over the years – with the setting up of a great variety of treaty-based and charter-based implementation procedures – to encompass comprehensive policy-planning and global human rights advocacy. Thus, as the UN official with principal responsibility for human rights activities, the High Commissioner became firmly embedded in the structure of the UN organization. This paper further underscores the catalytic role of non-governmental organizations in consistently pushing forward the high commissioner project, as it finally emerged in an atmosphere of high expectations.

United Nations peace-keeping is presently being faced with dynamic new challenges. The concept of peace-keeping is rapidly expanding, operations are being entrusted with new and innovative tasks, and are increasingly being deployed in intrastate conflicts. As the functions of peace-keepers vary, so too does the role and conception of peace-keeping. The new tasks entrusted to peace-keepers have brought with them new problems and difficulties. Controversial recent operations, such as those in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia, have particularly raised the issue of impartiality in the context of UN peace-keeping. Impartiality is traditionally a distinguishing feature of peace-keeping operations, yet its meaning and status remain unclear.

Reprisals originally served individuals seeking redress for an injustice suffered abroad. The concept, however, has undergone extensive development. Nowadays, reprisals are -in themselves illegal- retaliatory measures used by one state seeking redress for an illegal act committed by another. The prerequisites for legal reprisals areformulated in the Naulilaa Incident arbitration of 1928. In her examination of the recent history of the concept of reprisals, this arbitration is the author's starting point. After this examination she compares reprisals to other methods of redress. Finally, she investigates the limitation of the use of reprisals as laid down in humanitarian law treaties.

The European Court of Human Rights has often been criticized for lacking clarity and consistency in its reasoning of balancing human rights against conflicting public interests. To reconcile national security with human rights protection, the Court requires the interference with rights to be suitable for reaching the objective purported by the government. In this article I deal with how the Court conducts the suitability test in national security cases, in line with two models under which a few representative test considerations can be categorized: human rights priority model and national security priority model. To explain how each model works in a comparable sense, I follow the same analytic structure and examine the manner of the Court’s test and the intensity of its scrutiny. I argue that in compliance with the two models, the Court applies the suitability test in a consistent and predictable way in national security case law.

Some books present such a wide variety of perspectives and so many interesting themes and topics in a particular area of law that it is rather difficult to write a comprehensive but at the same time concise review article about them. Consequently, such books run the risk of remaining unobserved or unattended, however valuable may be their contribution to the development of that area of law. Something like that threatened to happen to the volume of papers that was edited by Sari Kouvo and Zoe Pearson and published in 2011. Writing the book review remained for rather a long time on my to-do list, because reading it had incited me to reconsider my own answers to some foundational questions about feminism, about law, and about the ‘and’ that seems so firmly situated between these two concepts. In fact, feminism and law have been at the core of my professional activities since I finished law school in 1983, so for some thirty years for me these two things were closely connected. I thought that I knew very well what I was doing and why! Reading this book – and having agreed to review it – made these questions manifest and urgent to answer. The book, in short, invokes much (self-critical) thinking about the why and how of any engagement with feminism and (international) law, which is a first reason to recommend it to anyone who stands open for such an endeavour. After a brief description of its structure and content, I will discuss just a few of the many thought-provoking materials in this volume and some of my preliminary reactions to them.

At the intersection of imperial rule and private power, Shanghai rose to international prominence in the second half of the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. It did so by taking advantage of the extraterritorial status and the dynamic, cosmopolitan population of the International Settlement. In evaluating the fate of the Shanghai Municipal Council, we seek to ascertain how private authority could have been constituted on a transnational basis within the framework of a treaty port. The rise of Shanghai was linked to some of the ambiguities of overlapping imperial rule and the possibilities it created for legal and governance experimentation. This is particularly clear in realms most associated with sovereign power, namely the International Settlement’s attempts to claim some taxation power and maintain law and order. That power, however, was interstitial at best and the product of fragile balances, as shown by the Council’s ultimate failure to secure a full international legal status for Shanghai. Nonetheless, the rise and fall of the International Settlement at Shanghai are worth reflecting upon, not only in relation to the history of China, imperialism and international law, but also as a way of thinking how the authority of large metropolitan centres might be constituted.

This article critiques the global concern that international commercial arbitration (ICA) is becoming increasingly ‘judicialized’, addressing the growing sentiment in ICA that arbitral proceedings are too lengthy, expensive, and complex. Assuming a contrarian perspective, it argues that attempts to address the cost and length of arbitration proceedings ought not to undermine the value of finely reasoned arbitral decisions grounded in law and justice. It also argues for a contextual assessment of ICA that extends beyond the debate over ‘judicialization’.

Using global illustrations and ICA developments in Australia as an initial guide, this article suggests that balancing party autonomy, accountability, efficiency, and fairness in ICA can help resolve these growing criticisms of ‘judicialization’. Ultimately, the reform of international arbitration should take place within a framework of ‘international best practice’ that is both analytical in nature and functional in operation. As such, ICA should not only be affordable and expeditious, it should serve as a legitimate and effective method of resolving international commercial disputes. In addition, it should balance the virtue of transparent proceedings against the need to respect the confidences of the parties.

International law ascribes to the conferral of a jus cogens status on a norm a particular legal significance. Bluntly put, jus cogens norms have legal consequences that norms of ordinary international law do not. International lawyers have a great many different ideas of what these legal consequences are more precisely. As of yet, the reason for this divide has not been fully clarified. This void tends to confuse jus cogens discourse on several issues such as the immunity of states and state officials in judicial proceedings originating in the violation of jus cogens norms, or the extradition of alleged perpetrators of international crimes, or again the non-applicability of amnesty laws concerning such crimes. It also impedes the justification of judicial and other legal decisions.

As this article argues, contrary to the general assumption, a lawyer’s conception of the legal consequences of jus cogens is not theory-neutral but dependent on his or her preferred understanding of the concept of law. The argument goes briefly as follows: (i) What causes international lawyers to disagree is the issue of whether or not jus cogens norms entail obligations concerned with their own enforcement; (ii) this is essentially an issue concerning the individuation of norms; (iii) depending on whether a lawyer takes the position of a legal positivist or a legal idealist, he or she uses different criteria for the individuation of jus cogens norms; and (iv) this is why, for legal idealists, jus cogens norms entail obligations concerned with their own enforcement, whereas for legal positivists they do not.

Environmental changes, such as sea level rise and coastal erosion, have an increasing impact on coastlines worldwide. Unilaterally declared maritime limits are generally determined by reference to coastlines and they are only binding insofar as they conform to the applicable law. Bilateral maritime boundaries are not equally affected by changing coastal geography because, once established, they are binding on parties to the arrangement under the pacta sunt servanda and res judicata principles. Maritime delimitation generally produces geographically stable boundaries. In principle, these remain fixed notwithstanding changes to the coastal geography that generates maritime entitlements or the ecosystems central to national interests. Indeed, stability and predictability are among the objectives of maritime delimitation. However, legal stability can be achieved without geographic stability and the requirement of predictability may be unattainable in a new world of environmental uncertainty. After all, baselines and derived outer limits fluctuate to reflect changing coastal geography and the same is true of bilateral boundaries, unless and until otherwise agreed. States have concluded boundary agreements that refer to fluctuating concepts, such as the equidistance line, instead of fixed co-ordinates. Furthermore, the International Court of Justice has left a segment of a maritime boundary to fluctuate until otherwise agreed and a Chamber of the Court has addressed the possibility of establishing a boundary by reference to a fluid oceano-biological boundary in the marine environment. This suggests that maritime boundaries can fluctuate if established by reference to sufficiently clear and relevant limits in the natural environment.

The Monroe Doctrine was originally formulated as a US foreign policy principle, but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it began to be redefined in relation to both the hemispheric policy of Pan-Americanism and the interventionist policies of the US in Central America and the Caribbean. Although historians and social scientists have devoted a great deal of attention to Latin American anti-imperialist ideologies, there was a distinct legal tradition within the broader Latin American anti-imperialist traditions especially concerned with the nature and application of the Monroe Doctrine, which has been overlooked by international law scholars and the scholarship focusing on Latin America. In recent years, a new revisionist body of research has emerged exploring the complicity between the history of modern international law and imperialism, as well as Third World perspectives on international law, but this scholarship has begun only recently to explore legal anti-imperialist contributions and their legacy. The purpose of this article is to trace the rise of this Latin American anti-imperialist legal tradition, assessing its legal critique of the Monroe Doctrine and its implications for current debates about US exceptionalism and elastic behaviour in international law and organizations, especially since 2001.