This article deals with the sea level rise phenomenon caused by the climate change process and its impact on the statehood of so-called disappearing island states as well as on the consequent factual and legal status of their populations. In classical international law doctrine, the loss of a state’s territory will lead to the extinction of statehood and, consequently, the loss of that state’s international legal personality, and possibly also to the statelessness of its nationals. This article proposes an alternative solution based on the transformation of disappearing island states into new non-territorial subjects of international law — “climate deterritorialized nations” — as successors to disappeared inundated states.

La question de l’établissement d’un organisme intergouvernemental chargé d’assurer l’exploitation rationnelle des stocks de l’Atlantique Sud-Est a été examinée par la Conférence de la FAO dès ses premières sessions. En 1946, la Conférence passa en revue les divers secteurs maritimes non desservis par un organisme approprié et porta l'Atlantique Sud-Est sur la liste des secteurs auxquels la FAO devait accorder la priorité.

It was Reported in july 1979 that Dr. Luisa Mistrali-Guidotti, a missionary doctor serving in Zimbabwe-Rhodesia, had been shot and killed by government troops while making her rounds in her “familiar” ambulance car near Mtoko. She had previously been threatened with arrest for attending to wounded guerrillas. Except for the fact that she had been killed, rather than taken prisoner and mistreated or tortured, her case had much in common with that of Dr. Sheila Cassidy, who in 1976 had been imprisoned and tortured for her services to Allende supporters during the Chilean revolution. Incidents such as these serve to emphasize that the medical profession is as much prone to the risks of armed conflict as is everybody else.

The delimitation of maritime boundaries is a complex and multifaceted process with legal and technical aspects. The process involves the determination of a maritime boundary in a situation where two or more states are confronted with overlapping titles. In the absence of any precise rules in treaty law and established customary rules based on state practice, it has been left to the jurisprudence of international courts and tribunals to develop the applicable law of maritime boundary delimitation. This article provides a detailed examination of the complex and multifaceted processes involved in maritime delimitation law. In doing so, it highlights recent developments in the field, with an emphasis on the emerging principles of “non-cut-off” and “non-distortion.” The article also analyzes the crystalizing rules on delimitation beyond 200 nautical miles and questions the applicability of these rules to the ongoing maritime boundary dispute between Canada and the United States in the Beaufort Sea.

The aim of the European Court of Human Rights is to bring about a situation in which individuals are able to get effective guarantees of their rights within their national legal systems. With this in mind, the author reviews some of the recent developments in cases before the court relating to evolutionary interpretation of the provisions of the convention, the role of the separation of powers in ensuring the protection of freedoms under the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, and the notion of human dignity within the convention framework. The author also considers the growing case load before the court and the need for reform and concludes by pointing out that the European system is the most effective international system yet for securing human rights protection.

This article argues that since the Tadić case before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, a new category of armed conflict has migrated from international criminal law to international humanitarian law: that of armed groups fighting each other within the borders of a state without the intervention of the armed forces of the latter. However, the extent to which the rules of this category of conflict cover issues that may arise in such a conflict has not been comprehensively examined. One may infer, from the war crimes that the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court criminalizes in this type of conflict, a dozen rules of international humanitarian law. After giving an historical account of the codification of this category of armed conflict, the author argues that there is a need to further develop these rules in order to provide a more comprehensive humanitarian law regime applicable to conflict exclusively between non-state armed groups. The absence of such a comprehensive regime should not, however, be taken as evidence of a legal vacuum. The author suggests that a law enforcement regime resting on international human rights law should be applied to relations between the armed groups and the territorial state, while the warring relationship between the armed groups should fall under the law of armed conflict, including those core customary rules that are now recognized as being equally applicable to international and non-international armed conflict.

This article argues that there is an increasing trend of civil society resorting to civil disobedience in relation to international legal values. International law, however, has not caught up with this trend. In fact, both international law and civil disobedience can gain much from a better understanding of their interaction. The article briefly traces the record of arguments drawn from international law in civil disobedience cases, highlights the theoretical constraints of the debate, and seeks to establish some basic foundations for an international legal theory of legitimate civil disobedience.

A significant increase in intermodal container transport led, during the period 1970–72, to intensive discussions in several international bodies concerning the proposed Convention on the International Combined Transport of Goods, known as the TCM Convention. Basically, the drafters of the convention aimed to establish a standard Combined Transport Contract (CT Document) and to provide for a new legal person called the Combined Transport operator (CTO). As the proposed convention could affect existing legal regimes that govern various modes of transporting cargo, it is not surprising that aviation interests, inter alia, carried out a searching and somewhat inconclusive examination of the implications of the proposed TCM Convention for international civil aviation.

Globalization has effectively enabled Canada’s domestically incorporated mining companies to escape the jurisdiction of the courts of the world, allowing them to carry out human rights abuses abroad with impunity. In February 2020, however, the Supreme Court of Canada issued a landmark judgment, Nevsun Resources Ltd v Araya, which attempted to address this jurisdictional gap. This decision held that Canadian corporations could potentially be liable under domestic law for breaches of customary international law perpetrated abroad. The decision has been criticized for straying too far from a classically positivist conception of international law. This article argues that such criticisms are well founded insofar as the majority’s judgment implicitly relies on progressive human-centric theories of international law without adequately addressing how these are reconcilable with international law as it is currently applied. It then explores the ideas that drive the majority’s opinion in order to propose two alternative approaches to holding corporations accountable that are more readily reconcilable with traditional state-centric conceptions of international law. Adopting these revised approaches could less contentiously lead to corporate accountability before future domestic courts. Finally, this article considers the potential international developments and repercussions to which this and other forward-looking decisions could lead.

The author argues that the Helms-Burton Act violates general principles of international law. The analysis begins with a brief discussion of the extraterritorial purposes, structure, and operation of the act, followed by a survey of international responses to Helms-Burton by the principal trading partners of the United States: diplomatic protest, formalized dispute settlement under international trade agreements, retaliatory blocking leghlation, and multi-hteral scrutiny in and by international institutions. The author then turns to principles of jurisdiction with a view to demonstrating that Helms-Burton does not meet the applicable thresholds to support either the private right to sue for trafficking in confiscated property under Title III of the act or the governmental exclusion of designated aliens from admission to the United States under Title IV. In this regard, substantive international law arguments in relation to extraterritoriality and nationality, remoteness, the effects doctrine, human rights, and the reasonable expectations of other nations are also considered.

Traditionally, international law has come to be regarded as consensual in nature, depending for its authority upon the recognition and acceptance of those entities which it seeks to bind. This view was accepted by the Permanent Court of International Justice in the S.S. Lotus: “The rules of law binding upon States emanate from their own free will as expressed in conventions or by usages generally accepted as expressing principles of law and established in order to regulate the relations between these co-existing independent communities or with a view to the achievement of common aims.” Article 38 of the Statute of the World Court, when listing the “sources” of international law, also acknowledges its consensual basis. In its substantive portion the article refers to conventions “establishing rules expressly recognized by the contesting States.” It then refers to custom “as evidence of a general practice accepted as law,” which has been explained by the International Court of Justice in the Asylum Case: “The Party which relies on a custom … must prove that this custom is established in such a manner that it has become binding on the other Party. [It] must prove that the rule invoked by it is in accordance with a constant and uniform usage practised by the States in question, and that this usage is the expression of a right appertaining to the [one] State … and a duty incumbent on the [other] State.”

The caracas meeting was only the first of three, or possibly four, sessions of the Third Law of the Sea Conference that will try to bridge the gap between the rambling six volume result of the Seabed Committee’s work and the concise articles of a new Law of the Sea Convention. The work at Caracas did not reach a stage at which it became possible to submit draft articles for the approval of the Conference. As a result, the final documents of the session made no commitment on any matters of substance. Such movement towards agreement as was achieved is therefore not binding, and is extremely vulnerable to changes of position by states in the six months preceding the next session in Geneva. Because of this, the emphasis of the present report will be more on the political process at Caracas than on the development of international law. My purpose is, first, to examine the new proposals on seabed issues and relate them to previously existing positions; second, to analyse the alignments behind the key positions; and third, to look at the other factors emerging as influences on the seabed negotiations.

On August 18, 1972, the International Court of Justice delivered its Judgment in the Appeal Relating to the Jurisdiction of the ICAO Council (India v. Pakistan) in which:

(a) By thirteen votes to three, it rejected Pakistan’s objections on the question of its competence, and found that it had jurisdiction to entertain India’s appeal from a series of decisions of the ICAO Council which had found that the Council had jurisdiction to entertain the application and complaint made before the Council by Pakistan on March 3, 1971, the details of the application and complaint being given below.

(b) By fourteen votes to two, it held the ICAO Council to be competent to entertain the above-mentioned application and complaint.

A series about the judges of the International Court must be based ontwo postulates: first, that the unique character and, of course,“value-structure” of each judge ü a variable of some importance inthe application, if not incremental formation, of international law;and second, that the International Court is an important institutionand has played a significant role in “the progressive development ofinternational Law.” While welcoming the idea of thü series, thereviewer has reservations about the way these postulates have beenembraced and adopted by the author and outlines his reservationsabout key jurisprudential assumptions and strategic choices thatwere made in designing the idea and about the ways those assumptionsand strategies have been implemented.