In 2011, the Appeals Chamber of the UN Special Tribunal for Lebanon purported to identify a customary international crime of transnational terrorism and applied it in interpreting domestic terrorism offences under Lebanese law. This article argues that the Tribunal's decision was incorrect because all the sources of custom relied upon by the Appeals Chamber – national legislation, judicial decisions, regional and international treaties, and UN resolutions – were misinterpreted, exaggerated, or erroneously applied. The Tribunal's laissez-faire attitude towards custom formation jeopardizes the freedom from retrospective criminal punishment, subjugating the human rights of potential defendants to the Tribunal's own moralizing conception of what the law ought to be. The decision is not good for international law or public confidence in its institutions and processes.

This article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental degradation is treated as an economic externality to be managed by special regimes. Through tracing the co-evolution of these assumptions about nature alongside seminal disciplinary concepts, it becomes evident that such understandings are central to shaping international law and that the discipline helps universalize and normalize them. By comprehending more broadly the relationship between nature and international law, it is possible to see beyond law's potential to correct environmental harm and identify the disciplinary role in driving ecological degradation. Venturing beyond the purview of international environmental lawyers, this article considers the role of all international lawyers in augmenting and mitigating ecological crises. It concludes that disciplinary solutions to environmental problems require radical departures from existing disciplinary tenets, necessitating new formulations that encapsulate rich and diverse understandings of nature.

This article focuses on Antonio Gramsci's hegemony theory. Hegemony, for Gramsci, is a particular way of living and thinking, a Weltanschauung (world-view), on which the preferences, taste, morality, ethics, and philosophical principles of the majority are based. Social struggles are transformed into legal ones in the course of processes in which juridical intellectuals are organizing hegemony under the special conditions of the legal system. We try to use this concept to contrast it with the prevailing readings of hegemony in international relations and in international law. ‘Hegemonic law’, we argue, is not the law of any superpower, but an asymmetric consensus which relies on a climate of world-society-wide recognition. The concrete form of hegemonic law under particular social conditions depends on the ‘historical bloc’, in which it is coupled with other social praxes. In the post-Westphalian system the historical bloc is fragmented into transnational and colliding legal regimes and law-generating processes in civil society.

Many transitional countries face the problem of establishing the rule of law in a weak justice sector where a gulf separates local legal norms from national, constitutional norms that are drawn largely from the international sphere. As a case study of East Timor this article challenges simplistic positivist notions about the normative hierarchy of laws within a constitutionally bounded polity. It argues that in transitional countries such as East Timor legal pluralism is important but must be properly tuned to serve the rule of law. Legal pluralism poses certain dangers when it operates without any of the checks or balances that ensure accountability and the promotion of constitutional values such as equality. The rule of law is not served by an informal system where there are no formal avenues of appeal and thus minimal accountability and transparency. A more promising version of legal pluralism that comports with the rule of law is one that empowers the state to monitor local decisions to ensure that they observe the norms set out in East Timor's Constitution.

This contribution presents international judicial institutions as multifunctional actors against the background of a traditional understanding, which sees just one function: settling disputes. The traditional, one-dimensional understanding eclipses other important functions that many international courts do actually perform in contexts of global governance and it underrates problems in their legitimation. In order to appreciate international adjudications’ manifold contributions to social interaction, the paper first identifies three more functions beyond dispute settlement: the stabilization of normative expectations, law-making, and the control as well as legitimation of authority exercised by others. It then places these functions within broader basic understandings of international courts, which respectively picture them as instruments of the parties in a state-centred world order, as organs of a value-based international community, and as institutions of specific legal regimes. The distinct problems that each of these basic understanding faces lead to the contours of a new paradigm for the study of international courts as actors exercising public authority. The present functional analysis ultimately helps to refine both the phenomenon and normative questions.

As the first cases before the ICC proceed to the Appeals Chamber, the judges ought to critically evaluate the merits and demerits of the control-theory of perpetratorship and its related doctrines. The request for a possible recharacterization of the form of responsibility in the case of Katanga and the recent acquittal of Ngudjolo can be taken as indications that the control-theory is problematic as a theory of liability. The authors, in a spirit of constructive criticism, invite the ICC Appeals Chamber to take this unique opportunity to reconsider or improve the control-theory as developed by the Pre-Trial Chambers in the Lubanga and Katanga cases.

International legal scholarship to date has largely neglected the donor-driven dynamics of international criminal justice. This article advances what I term ‘donors’ justice’ as an analytic frame for interpreting the work of international criminal tribunals. Donors’ justice is defined as third-party financial support for tribunal activity. It imports market rationalities into the field of criminal accountability, which assume overlapping discursive, political, and economic forms. The Special Court for Sierra Leone provides a case study of the implications of donor-driven logics for international criminal justice, particularly the material problems of insecure funding and the ethical problems of limited personal jurisdiction.

The objective of this paper is to examine how the Court has dealt with existing general international law governing secession and to evaluate the effects that this opinion could have on future developments in this field. The narrow interpretation of the question submitted by the UN General Assembly permitted the Court to avoid many important questions. The Court made no statements concerning Kosovo's statehood and recognition by third states and made no mention of statehood requirements or the ‘principle of effectiveness’. The Court also refused to examine whether Kosovo (or any other entity outside the colonial context) had a ‘right’ to secession, but gave no endorsement to attempts to apply external self-determination outside the colonial context or to the theory of ‘remedial secession’. This paper explains why the Court did not apply the ‘Lotus’ freedom principle in the Kosovo case. It welcomes the indirect, but clear, position of the Court that a declaration of independence can, in some situations (and especially in the case of external aggression), be illegal – a position that contradicts the old theory, stemming from Jellinek, that the creation of a state is nothing but a ‘simple fact’. While the Court correctly found that outside these exceptional circumstances, no general prohibition against unilateral declarations of independence exists in international law, it should have added that international law is not ‘neutral’ in this field, that it disfavors secession, and that it creates a presumption against the effectiveness of secession. The ‘legal-neutrality’ stance adopted by the Court is not without risks. Indeed, the Court should have been more cautious in its assertion that ‘the scope of the principle of territorial integrity is confined to the sphere of relations between states’, not only because recent practice clearly indicates the contrary, but also because its position could have an unwelcome effect in resolving future separatist conflicts by rendering countries extremely sceptical of solutions of autonomy or international administration.

Governments have increasingly been giving attention to the need for, and prospects of, ensuring contestability of markets through international agreements. This paper explores what has been achieved so far in the context of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and what might be done to further enhance the ‘competition-friendliness’ of the multilateral trading system. The case of high-technology industrial rivalry is used for concreteness. High-tech is interesting because it cuts across many of the issues that are relevant from a systemic perspective, both ‘old’ (market access) and ‘new’ (investment, antitrust). We conclude that greater contestability of regulatory regimes in domestic legal orders may be beneficial. This can be pursued by giving private parties the right to contest actions of WTO member states before national courts.

In this contribution the reparation possibilities for victims of sexual violence at the Inter-national Criminal Court and at the Trust Fund for Victims and their families are explored. This is done by explaining first of all why victims of sexual violence – and especially women – are in urgent need of reparation during and after conflict, with a special focus on the situation of female survivors of sexual violence in Rwanda. The reparation possibilities for victims of sexual violence at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda are subsequently discussed, followed by a similar discussion with regard to the ICC. Questions such as the nature of the best forms of reparation for victims of sexual violence and at what point they are made are also dealt with. Although the ICC reparations regime offers in theory a good means of providing restorative justice to victims of sexual violence, it is important that the special concerns and needs of such victims are not easily overlooked by the Court and that swift action is taken by the Trust Fund for Victims and their families to address their plight.

Recent years have seen a proliferation of forms of transitional justice, ranging from pure truth and reconciliation formulas to various integrated approaches, combining international or internationalized trials with alternative forms of justice. Many of these phenomena have been examined in individual case studies. However, few attempts have been made to put the various pieces of the puzzle together and to analyze the merits and pitfalls of different institutional choices of transitional justice. This essay seeks to fill this shortcoming. It looks at different institutional designs of transitional justice from a comparative and impact-based perspective. It tries to identify some of the contextual parameters which may contribute to the success or failure of specific formulas of institutional design. Moreover, this contribution seeks to establish that international and domestic models of justice are not contradictory, but interdependent forces in the process of sustainable peacemaking, in areas such as criminal trials, victim's protection and reparation. It argues that transitional justice requires pluralist and complementary approaches, combining parallel mechanisms at the domestic and the international level, in order to succeed in practice, especially after the coming into operation of the International Criminal Court.

Over the last decade international lawyers have been increasingly concerned with the ‘fragmentation’ of international law. However, given that this expression has been repeatedly used by the profession since the mid-nineteenth century to depict the state of international law, one may wonder about its recent revival in the international legal discourse. Why has it re-emerged? What can we learn from previous invocations? An answer may be sought by contextualizing the fragmentation debate in a historical perspective. This brings out the repetitive and relatively stylized modes in which the profession has narrated legal developments. This essay suggests a correlation between periods of crisis in general and a critical view of fragmentation on the one hand, and periods of scholarly enthusiasm and the prevalence of positive views about fragmentation on the other. This analysis sheds critical light on both the implicit assumptions and political implications of the current debate on fragmentation.

In Resolution 1373 the Security Council laid down a series of general and abstract rules binding on all UN member states. In doing so, the Council purported to legislate. This article discusses whether it is entitled to do so. In the light of the Charter and the past practice of United Nations organs, it argues that the Council can only exercise its Chapter VII powers in response to specific situations or conduct. In enacting Resolution 1373 the Council acted ultra vires. The article looks at the circumstances in which such an extension of the Security Council's powers might be acceptable, but concludes that unilateral attempts by the Council to legislate would be destructive of the international legal order.

Military and humanitarian lawyers approach the laws of war in different ways. For military lawyers, the starting point is military necessity, and the reigning assumption is that legal regulation of war must accommodate military necessity. For humanitarian lawyers, the starting point is human dignity and human rights. The result is two interpretive communities that systematically disagree not only over the meaning of particular law-of-war norms, but also over the sources and methods of law that could be used to resolve the disagreements. That raises the question whether military lawyers’ advice should acknowledge any validity to the contrary views of the ‘humanitarian’ community. The article offers a systematic analysis of the concept of military necessity, showing that civilian interests must figure in assessing military necessity itself. Even on its own terms, the military version of the law of war should seek to accommodate the civilian perspectives featured in the humanitarian version.

This article analyses the recent state practice in which the right of self-defence has been invoked in order to justify the use of force in response to attacks by non-state actors. The main purpose of this analysis is to determine whether the law of self-defence has evolved through this practice. It is submitted that the latter confirms the tendency, evidenced by the US operation ‘Enduring Freedom’ in Afghanistan in 2001, towards allowing states to respond in self-defence to private armed attacks, that is, attacks which are committed by non-state actors only. The article also aims to shed some light on other fundamental conditions of the law of self-defence which played a significant role in the legal assessment of the recent state practice. It is argued in this respect that this practice confirms that any armed attack must reach some level of gravity – which may be assessed by accumulating minor uses of force – in order to trigger the right of self-defence, and that proportionality of the action taken in self-defence may be assessed in quantitative terms, but only as a means of making a prima facie judgement about the necessity of this action.

This article examines the possibility of creating a law of armed conflict that could be uniformly applied to both international and non-international armed conflict. The article looks at the history of modern armed conflict, and charts the progression of warfare from a predominantly interstate event to that which is more likely to be characterized as non-international or internal. The increasing prevalence of non-international armed conflicts throughout the twentieth century has lead to ongoing moves on behalf of the international community to bring the regulation of such conflicts further within the ambit of international regulation. With this in mind, the article argues that such moves have blurred the historical distinction between types of armed conflict to the point where the distinction could be eliminated altogether. By looking at international treaties, tribunals, and state practice, this article asserts that the law of armed conflict could be uniformly applied, with the aim of ensuring that all participants in armed conflict are equally and humanely treated.

Since the demise of philosophical foundationalism and that of the Aristotelian idea of an inner meaning of words, scholarship about international law is no longer perceived as a mining activity geared towards the extraction of pre-existing meaning. Rather, international legal scholarship is in a state of fierce competition for persuasiveness and semantic authority. This does not elevate persuasiveness into the determinant of legality, nor does it lead to a total rejection of the internal point of view. The configuration of that competition for naming is informed by the current structure (and the membership) of the interpretative community of international law. In this competition for naming, words constitute semantic weaponry. Mention is made here of uses of words in international law to create textual economy, generate semantic instability, rough out and hone scholarly ideas, enhance textual aesthetics, yield empiricism, create straw men and preserve the argumentative character of scholarly idea, gratify oneself, boost fame and careers, and intimidate peers. It is also argued that there is nothing to rein in in the use of such semantic tactics in the interpretative community of international law, for paradigmatic revolution is meant to be permanent. It is only if international legal scholars were to lose their social identity that the competition for naming and the interpretative community of international law would vanish altogether.

Discussions on the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have focused on its impact on Lebanese sovereignty and, specifically, the fact that a Chapter VII resolution seems to bypass Lebanese democracy. Simply relying on the idea of a ‘breach of international peace and security’ to overcome these arguments is not helpful. It is more useful to locate the creation of the Tribunal within evolving international criminal justice practices. These practices are increasingly constraining the Security Council's own work rather than the contrary, as international criminal justice gradually emancipates itself from the confines of ‘international peace and security’ and becomes a logic unto itself.

This article starts with a paradox: international law-making is ridden with reasonable disagreement and yet no state can be bound by international law without its consent and hence without agreement. Breaking away from the pragmatic resignation that prevails among international law scholars on this question, the article proposes an interpretation of the role of state consent that both fits and justifies its central role in the practice of international law-making and, hopefully, strengthens the latter's legitimacy in the future. Its proposed justification actually lies in the circumstances of reasonable disagreement among democratic states and this proposal dissolves the paradox. The article argues that, in international law as it is the case domestically, consent is neither a criterion of validity of law nor a ground for its legitimate authority. It also dispels two myths about state consent: its necessary relationship to legal positivism and state sovereignty. Instead, the article argues, the role of democratic state consent is that of an exception to the legitimate authority of international law and hence to its bindingness in a concrete case. While the legitimacy of international law is not democratic, the democratic nature of states and their democratic accountability to their people matter. This is especially the case in circumstances of widespread and persistent reasonable disagreement as they prevail among democratic states in international law-making. In these circumstances, respecting the sovereign equality of democratic states by requiring their consent is the way to grant an equal voice to their people. Of course, there are limits to the democratic state exception that are inherent to both its democratic dimension (it requires respecting basic political equality) and its consensual dimension (it requires that consent is expressed in a free, fair and informed fashion). The article concludes by showing how the proposed disagreement-attuned account of democratic state consent explains various characteristics of the main international law-making processes, i.e., treaties and custom.

The International Criminal Court (ICC) is surrounded by controversies and criticisms. This article highlights some patterns in the arguments, showing that many plausible criticisms reflect inescapable dyads. For any position that Court could take, one or more powerful criticisms can inevitably be advanced. The tension can be obscured because shared terms are often recruited for opposite meanings. Awareness of these patterns can (i) provide a framework to better situate arguments, (ii) reveal the deeper complexity of the problems, and (iii) help us to evaluate and improve upon the arguments. Awareness of dyadic structures can lead to a debate that is more generous, as we acknowledge the difficulty and uncertainty of choosing among flawed options, yet also more rigorous, as we attempt to articulate and improve upon our frameworks of evaluation. The goal of this article is to encourage a better conversation that can generate better insights.