This article uses the case study of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability (CIJA) and its work on Syria as a way to reflect on the challenges international lawyers face in conducting research in relation to secret, highly constrained spaces. In particular, the article engages with debates within anthropology on the nature of para-ethnographic research as a way to think about research relationships between international legal scholars and practitioners as conducive of collaboration, (inter)dependency and dialogue. Yet this type of research, especially without the grounding of legal texts, raises questions about the legal researcher’s integrity and author(ity). Thus, the article’s core concern is to explore the inter-relationship between a variety of risks that can occur for both scholars and research subjects operating in secret spaces.

What should be the role of law in response to the spread of artificial intelligence in war? Fuelled by both public and private investment, military technology is accelerating towards increasingly autonomous weapons, as well as the merging of humans and machines. Contrary to much of the contemporary debate, this is not a paradigm change; it is the intensification of a central feature in the relationship between technology and war: double elevation, above one’s enemy and above oneself. Elevation above one’s enemy aspires to spatial, moral, and civilizational distance. Elevation above oneself reflects a belief in rational improvement that sees humanity as the cause of inhumanity and de-humanization as our best chance for humanization. The distance of double elevation is served by the mechanization of judgement. To the extent that judgement is seen as reducible to algorithm, law becomes the handmaiden of mechanization. In response, neither a focus on questions of compatibility nor a call for a ‘ban on killer robots’ help in articulating a meaningful role for law. Instead, I argue that we should turn to a long-standing philosophical critique of artificial intelligence, which highlights not the threat of omniscience, but that of impoverished intelligence. Therefore, if there is to be a meaningful role for law in resisting double elevation, it should be law encompassing subjectivity, emotion and imagination, law irreducible to algorithm, a law of war that appreciates situated judgement in the wielding of violence for the collective.

State-owned enterprises (SOEs) have long constituted, and are likely to remain, an important instrument in any government’s toolbox for a variety of economic and societal goals. However, the significant extent of state ownership among the world’s top companies, and the quantitative and qualitative transformation and hybrid nature of SOEs, raises the issue of their impact on international trade flows and the competitive process. This article addresses the question of how international trade agreements regulate SOEs, with a view to furthering the international contestability of markets, while, at the same time, allowing governments to provide support to SOEs as a means of dealing with market failures and the pursuit of public goals. After a brief introduction to contemporary state capitalism, the argument is developed in three main parts. The first part situates SOEs within the GATT and WTO frameworks and elaborates on the findings of previous literature with a view to highlighting the main shortcomings of such discipline. The second part re-examines the notion of ‘competitive neutrality’ by locating contemporary trade agreements within the larger contextual relationships between the state, the market, and the social, and thus reconstructs the normative rationales and general policy implications of the disciplines under examination. Against this background, the third part critically assesses the new disciplines on SOEs in recent preferential trading areas (PTAs). The main conclusion is that the search for binding rules has not led to balanced regimes and, despite the wider scope of the new rules, notable problems that have emerged within the WTO context remain unsolved.

This article studies how the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR, the Court) adjusts damages for human rights violations. The article empirically analyses 13 years of ECtHR’s case law in relation to Articles 2 (right to life), 3 (torture, inhuman and degrading treatment), and 5 (arbitrary detention) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR, the Convention). The goal is to understand whether the statements made by the Court about the aims pursued through just satisfaction are confirmed in practice. Through an empirical quantitative study relating to non-pecuniary damages, the article analyses the practice of the Court in awarding non-pecuniary damages for human rights violations and compares it to the competing visions of the ECtHR’s function. In particular, I am interested in determining whether just satisfaction is aimed at redressing the suffering of the victim, her circumstances and vulnerability, or whether the focus is more on the respondent state, its conduct and its past human rights record. The answers to these questions will contribute to the debate whether the ECtHR’s role is one of delivering ‘individual justice’ or whether the Court is – as an international court enforcing an international treaty – focused on the ‘state’.

This contribution focuses on the Court of Justice of the European Union (Court or CJEU) reliance on international law in cases involving economic agreements covering occupied territories. In its earlier case law, the Court adopted a formalistic approach by ignoring the broader international legal framework of the dispute in an effort to achieve conformity with international law, while at the same time avoiding being drawn into political storms. The article continues by identifying an even more worrisome trend in the Court’s latest judgments in the Front Polisario and Western Sahara Campaign UK cases. In these two cases the Court showed its willingness to stretch the international rules of treaty interpretation to a breaking point in order to avoid pronouncing on the politically sensitive question of the de facto application of the EU’s agreements with Morocco in the territory of Western Sahara. The article concludes by asserting that the Court’s line of argumentation brings another dimension to the Völkerrechtsfreundlichkeit debate. The classical, binary understanding of the Court’s approach as ‘open/hostile’ to international law only provides us with a partial picture of how international law was actually used in these cases. The Court’s apparent willingness to rely on international law as a heuristic device to reinforce an outcome that radically departs from the logic and structure of international law and international legal argumentation requires a more in-depth engagement with both the content of the international law rules invoked in those judgments and with the Court’s use of such rules.

The Okavango River Basin is a transboundary basin which serves as an important source of water resources for three riparian Southern African states, namely Angola, Botswana, and Namibia. If not properly managed, the Okavango River Basin is a potential source of conflict amongst the three countries. In order to reduce the likelihood of disputes among riparian states, the Governments of Angola, Botswana, and Namibia have signed and ratified an agreement establishing the institutional framework for the management of the shared water resources. This article discusses the legal aspects of the institutional arrangements in the Okavango River Basin. It highlights the importance of river basin organizations in the effective management of transboundary watercourses. This article concludes that the institutional arrangements between the riparian states with access to the Okavango River provide the framework for resolving possible disputes peacefully. Further, it concludes that these institutional arrangements promote co-operation over the management of the shared water resources.

Judges of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) are prominent jurists of high merit. However, little is known about certain extra-legal factors of the candidates that guide states in their selection and appointment process. This article focuses on examining extra-legal factors that matter for states in the selection process. Such extra-legal factors demonstrate that elections of candidates to the Court constitute another aspect of a broader political struggle to define the meaning of international law. The article situates the discussion on the selection process in the broader context of the discussion on biases in international law to suggest that the election of candidates to the Court becomes both an instrument and a procedure for controlling the discourse. The characteristics of the judges thus matter as a proxy to control the production and direction of such discourse. This article then explores the ways in which some states have greater strategic advantage in the selection and election processes that enables them to control the discourse to define the meaning of international law effectively.

The civilian-combatant frame persists as the main legal lens through which lawyers organize the relationships of conflict zone actors. As a result, little attention has been paid in international legal scholarship to different gradations of ‘civilianness’ and the ways in which some civilians might compete to distinguish themselves from each other. Drawing attention to international humanitarian actors – particularly those working for NGOs – this article explores the micro-strategies these actors engage in to negotiate their relative status in war. Original qualitative empirical findings from South Sudan illuminate the way in which humanitarians struggle over distinction with individuals working for the UN peacekeeping mission, UNMISS. As is shown, humanitarian actors are doing away with a static civilian-combatant binary in their daily practice. A more fluid logic informs both their self-conceptualization and their interactions with others who share the operational space. Humanitarian actors envision civilianness as a contingent concept, and they operate according to a continuum along which everything is a matter of degree and subtle gradation. As civilianness is detached from the civilian, any given actor might acquire or shed civilian-like, or combatant-like, characteristics at any moment. The distinction practices that humanitarian actors enact can be understood as a bid for legibility, so that they might be rendered intelligible in international law and in the eyes of other actors as a special kind of civilian – the ‘civilian plus’.

One of the main catalysts for the shift towards renewable energies has been the practice of support schemes in a key number of EU member states. Some of these states have since withdrawn or revoked much of their original support, which has resulted in investment treaty arbitrations being filed against them under the Energy Charter Treaty. Arguably, a balance should be found between investors’ legitimate expectations concerning the stability of the legal framework and the host states’ right to adapt regulations to new needs. This can be achieved by clarifying and delimiting the principle of fair and equitable treatment, and by encapsulating it in a more precise set of rules. Due to its open character, this principle could otherwise become too intrusive a standard of judicial review for the exercise of sovereign power by host states. It could be diluted into a rhetorical framework inviting uncertainty and subjective judgment. While the focus of this article is on energy, the concern for legal stability equally applies to all those sectors where large upfront investments are required, which can only be recouped in the long run.

Judges ad hoc of the International Court of Justice have been widely criticized for their supposed lack of impartiality. This criticism may seem all the more powerful if one takes into account that judges ad hoc were created as a means to avoid the Court’s bias and appearance of bias. However, recent developments in the appointment of judges ad hoc indicate that, far from being a detriment to the states’ perception of the Court’s impartiality, judges ad hoc are a means to enhance the perception that the Court as a whole is impartial. Such developments include the increased frequency with which former elected judges are appointed judges ad hoc, the practice of electing judges from the ranks of former (or sitting) judges ad hoc, and the appointment of nationals or non-nationals as judges ad hoc. The institution of judges ad hoc has come full circle, and should be regarded as fulfilling the function for which it was created.

This article maps out the landscape holding and connecting three interrelated phenomena: art, international criminal justice, and reconciliation. We argue that reconciliation, viewed as a restoration process, is one of the goals of international criminal justice. Yet, its attainment through law is challenging because international criminal justice, strictly construed, is outcome oriented. Art can serve as a ‘bridge’ linking normative legal standards with their reconciliatory aspirations. The key argument is therefore that art has the clear ability to mediate and amplify the law’s restorative potential through three key features. Firstly, art reflects the complexity of the human condition and reserves a place for emotional processing. Secondly, it is a useful relational tool in opening the space for dialogue, the latter being essential for reconciliation. Lastly, art has the capacity to translate legalistic findings into a language accessible to a wider audience.