Chapter 1 starts by illustrating the puzzle of American antagonism to the ICC. It then introduces the book’s three main questions: Why does the US fear the ICC? When, exactly, does the US oppose the ICC? And does the ICC’s track record justify American hostility? The rest of the chapter previews the book’s arguments, explains why the US–ICC relationship is of crucial importance for policymakers, and discusses how the book provides new insights into some of the big questions in international relations.

Beginning with a discussion of the right to strike in international law, the chapter explains how most industrial action was regarded as a tortious wrong. Statute provides a limited immunity for trade unions and their officials for industrial action that is part of a trade dispute. In order to obtain that immunity in tort, trade unions must carry out a secret ballot of the members to demonstrate that there is majority support for a strike. Apart from the foregoing, this chapter also examines legal restrictions on secondary action and picketing, and concludes with a discussion of the limited impact of the Human Rights Act 1998 on the scope of the right to strike in British law.

This chapter analyzes the development of discourses on human rights and on inequality from 1962 until 1974 through the lens of Manouchehr Ganji, an Iranian human rights scholar and UN Special Rapporteur. Where other scholars have examined Ganji’s report The Widening Gap from 1973 with a key focus upon its impact within the UN, this chapter contextualizes the report in three novel ways, bringing in his 1962 doctoral dissertation not previously studied in the research literature; connecting it to how inequality became a major theme in the late 1960s and early 1970s broadly across development discourse, and to how human rights increasingly were deployed to denounce inequality; and, finally, by discussing these developments with regard to recent discussions of the historical relationships between human rights, inequality, and neoliberalism. Crucially, beyond the singularity of the one individual studied most in this chapter stands a much more general and pertinent point: The human rights project in 1973 was an ambitious anti-inequality project. It was a structural approach to human rights, aiming at undoing deeper within- and between-nation inequalities.

This chapter examines the sources of law IATs are applying, grouping these sources into two substantially different categories: ‘self-contained’ and ‘universalizing’ sources. The self-contained sources of international administrative law are those which are specific to a given organization, including the contract of employment; the staff regulations and staff rules; the bulletins, circulars, manuals, and issuances of the organization; the constituent instrument of the organization; decisions and resolutions of the plenary organ of the organization or other decision-making body; and the practice of the organization. The chapter then examines the ‘universalizing’ sources of international administrative law, which are those sources, referred to with increasing frequency, which are ‘outward-looking’ and thus may be applied in common by multiple IATs. These include general principles of law, international law, and decisions of other international administrative tribunals, the latter to be referred to herein as ‘cross-fertilization’. As a result of these ‘universalizing’ sources, this chapter concludes that a universal law of internal justice has begun to crystalize.

International law arose in the mid nineteenth century when European powers determined to codify and formalize customary law, to restrain the use of violence in armed conflict, and to create certain protected categories of people. The Hague and Geneva Conventions formed the core of the emerging laws of war and international humanitarian law. While the Conventions have been breached at times, they still form one of the most widely accepted and long-standing aspects of international law. International humanitarian law and laws of war clarify and formalize the differentiation between civilians and combatants, regular and irregular forces, lawful and unlawful combatants. While international laws attempt to make the demarcation of these boundaries as precise as possible, the realities of war always undermine and undo such delineation efforts. Recently, there have been increasing efforts to regulate these gray areas and create international laws and agencies to regulate groups that elude classification.

The chapter offers an introduction to the historical intertwinings of human rights and global population control efforts from the 1940s to the mid-1990s. It describes the aim of the book to investigate how human rights language was strategically employed to justify and implement large-scale family planning programs worldwide. The introduction highlights the complex interactions between individual and collective rights that will be explored throughout the book, including in case studies involving countries like India, Ireland, the United States, and Yugoslavia. The introduction also addresses contemporary challenges and debates surrounding population growth, environmental concerns, and reproductive rights. By analyzing the historical evolution of human rights discourse in the context of population control, the introduction describes the aim of the book as shedding light on the nuanced relationship between individual freedoms, societal well-being, and the ethical considerations inherent in global reproductive policies.

The chapter analyzes the crisis and expansion of human rights in the 1970s as a dual phenomenon of the population control movement. It explores the disillusionment among population control activists due to the failure to achieve desired fertility rate reductions despite international efforts. The chapter highlights the shift in perspectives on the human rights framework for population control, with criticisms emerging from various actors including demographers, sociologists, and international organizations. The chapter also discusses the emergence of new actors such as the women’s movement in advocating for human rights in family planning. It argues that UN reports on family planning were shaped by conflicting political imaginaries between UN member states along Cold War and North–South divides. Furthermore, it delves into the debates among international lawyers regarding coercion, national sovereignty, and the role of international law in addressing population growth. It argues that international lawyers saw the legal regulation of population control as a test of the effectivness of international law as such.

The relationship between One Health and human rights is both symbiotic and antagonistic. The objectives of One Health align with human rights to the extent that they advance specific rights, particularly the rights to life and health. One Health also promotes human dignity, the foundation of human rights, by improving environmental conditions and addressing threats to health that impact people’s lives. Yet the inherent anthropocentrism of human rights sits uneasily with One Health’s commitment to human, animal, and environmental health. The growing field of environmental human rights may offer some way forward for resolving this tension and advancing the legal framework for One Health, while also highlighting some of the potential pitfalls along the way. Early environmental human rights positioned the environment as a precondition for the enjoyment of human rights. More recently the right to a healthy environment has been recognised more widely, expanding the potential for human rights objectives to include protection of environmental health, and perhaps also animal health. This chapter will explore the lessons that human rights law might offer and the potential for the right to a healthy environment to temper the anthropocentrism of human rights in a way that better promotes the triple objectives of One Health.

Although international legal scholars have never captured or paid attention to the epistemology of the secret at work in international legal thought of practice, the idea of secret has not been totally absent from international legal thought. For instance, international legal scholars have occasionally mobilized the idea of the hermeneutics of suspicion to describe the way in which certain scholars dismiss opponents’ arguments to be ideologically or politically motivated wrong postures as opposed to scientifically valid positions. Likewise, a lot of scholarly works have been focused on the secretive and undisclosed practices which are supposedly at work in various international legal processes. This chapter reviews these contemporary engagements by international lawyers with the idea of secret in international law.

During the Symposium held in Manhattan in 2004 coining the One Health approach, the role of environmental law was underlined. The IUCN Commission on Environmental Law, through its representative from Southeast Asia, insisted on the importance of biodiversity conservation and the protection of wildlife while massive culling measures were taken to counteract zoonotic diseases. In this chapter we will show how the development of the One Health approach has been historically favoured by environmental law, acknowledging the interactions between health and biodiversity. We will detail how it has spread into the multilateral environmental agreements in relation to biodiversity conservation and how the environmental protection arena has evolved quite independently from the health sector in implementing the One Health approach until UNEP joined the FAO-OIE (WOAH)-WHO forces and the input from the OHHLEP (One Health High Level Expert Panel) in that respect. We will conclude with examples of One Health implementation in relation to environmental law, whether they concern research projects or training, notably in Southeast Asia.