Japan has been lagging far behind other jurisdictions in Asia such as Hong Kong and Singapore, which have been widely recognized as international arbitration hubs. However, efforts have been made to transform Japanese cities into new arbitration hubs.

Historically speaking, the Asia-Pacific region has contributed to the evolution of the investment treaty arbitration practice. However, the case number involving this region remains low when compared with the strong growth of investment treaty arbitration worldwide. The region's role is disproportionate to its prominence in the world economy or its extensive network of investment treaty agreements (IIAs).

Thanks in no small part to its open market approach and consistent support for pro-arbitration policies, over the past few decades, Hong Kong has emerged as one of the world's leading centers for international arbitration.

Peacekeeping, conceptually, was designed to be traditionally defensive in nature with a neutral, unarmed, multinational force maintaining or monitoring peace. The first major example of a United Nations peacekeeping force dates to the initial Arab-Israeli conflict with the UN Truce Supervision Organization (UNSTO), established in May 1948. The peacekeepers were there to observe and maintain the ceasefire and assist in any terms of the armistice agreements following the initial fighting with the partition of the British Mandate in Palestine and the later declaration of the State of Israel. The Security Council Resolution “Instruct[ed] the United Nations Mediator in Palestine, in concert with the Truce Commission, to supervise the observance of the above provisions, and decide[d] that they shall be provided with a sufficient number of military observers.” UNTSO was followed by a variation, the United Nations Military Observer Group in India and Pakistan, which was to observe and report violations of the ceasefire along the contested border. Both of these original UN peacekeeping operations are still in existence after seventy years. This original concept of peacekeeping was based upon the United Nation's principle that the organization would act to prevent conflict between states following the atrocities committed during World War II through its neutrality. However, the term “peacekeeping” is not found anywhere within the United Nations Charter. It is instead inferred under both Chapter VI and Chapter VII powers to resolve disputes.

In this Article, I argue that there is inconsistency and confusion at the heart of UN policy on use of deadly force by peacekeepers and that this lack of clarity has resulted in deaths and injuries to people that pose no threat to UN forces or anybody else and have not engaged in any violent activities or indeed in any type of crime. Such deaths and injuries are likely to recur if the United Nations continues to use the same rules of engagement for law enforcement operations as it does for operations aimed at curtailing violence by parties to an armed conflict. The problem would be greatly mitigated if the United Nations were to formally commit to applying customary international human rights law standards on use of force in all circumstances except those to which international humanitarian law applies.

Since 1999, in the aftermath of the tragic failures in Rwanda and Srebrenica, the UN Security Council (UNSC) has readily and consistently entrusted UN peacekeeping operations (UNPKOs) with robust mandates and the authority to use force beyond self-defense for the protection of civilians. In the ensuing decades, it has also sought to provide more robust resources including vehicles, weapons, equipment, and technologies to enable UNPKOs to implement and fulfill their mandates. What is only now being addressed, however, is the need for more robust performance. This presentation describes the mindset, understanding, and attitudes that are required to achieve an effective level of performance.

In this Article I focus on the use of force in self-defense by United Nations peacekeepers that are members of military contingents. This is an important matter because the use of force in self-defense remains the foundation for the use of force in all United Nations peace operations—including aggressive or robust peacekeeping.

Good afternoon. I would like to start by thanking Judge Brower and the Executive Board of ASIL for inviting me to present the Brower Lecture this year. Judge Brower's leadership in international arbitration, and his contributions to the field truly are too many to list, so I will not do that!

New innovations in human rights fact-finding and criminal investigations offer both opportunities and challenges for human rights law in practice.1 As documentation of human rights violations becomes more difficult and complex, practitioners are exploring ways to augment their work with new tools and new methodologies.2 Social media, accessible satellite data, and even drone technology have expanded the capacity of human rights investigators to document abuses, even when access to the sites of atrocities is limited.

Since 2005, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has been exploring the use of Geospatial Technologies in a Human Rights Context. These efforts began under the auspices of the Science and Human Rights Program, and focused primarily on establishing whether and to what extent satellite imagery could be used to document human rights violations resulting from armed conflict. In partnership with Amnesty International, the project's first applications of this technology involved using visible and near-infrared satellite imagery to investigate reports of villages being burned in Darfur, Sudan. These efforts established the usefulness of satellite imagery as a tool that allowed investigators access areas that would otherwise be completely off-limits due to governmental restrictions, security considerations, remoteness, or some combination of all three. They likewise established a model of collaboration that has proven itself time and again in the application of these new tools to human rights responses.

My current research looks at ways in which people and institutions are using technology to build the evidentiary record in international criminal litigation. In particular, I focus on the collection of, and reliance on, what I call user-generated evidence. This is footage that an ordinary citizen—the user—records on their smartphone, in an effort to achieve legal accountability.

Investigation and prosecution at international criminal courts and tribunals of war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide often present challenges which are less common in domestic judicial systems. These challenges may include conducting investigations many years after the crimes were committed, in faraway countries, in which much of the testimonial and other evidence is likely in a language not spoken by the majority of the lawyers and investigators on the team.

Welcome—you are a very select audience—to this roundtable. And I have just been quibbling. How can you have a roundtable in a room this size? But, anyway, it is still called a roundtable on the Security Council, Women, Peace, and Security Agenda in Practice. I was going to say to start with, I do not know how many people in the room for whom the words “women, peace, and security” make sense or is a sort of language that you are actually used to. Certainly, when I talk to many international lawyers who are not in the room, they look at me blankly and say, “What? What is that?”

We were there, yes. We celebrated the adoption of the resolution. But the challenge, therefore, from the very outset has been how to make it effective on the ground, how to ensure that this Security Council agenda means something to women, on the ground, in conflict situations, and in post-conflict situations.

Okay, I do not know how many of you know about Myanmar, so we are situated in Southeast Asia, bordering China, India, Bangladesh, and Thailand. Myanmar is the second largest country in Southeast Asia.

The gap between rhetoric and implementation is exactly what I want to talk about. Sanam described the flurry of activity and really intentional, dogged advocacy of civil society in getting this foundational resolution passed, 1325, and lo and behold, there was no immediate and dramatic change, and there has not been since then. But there have been some ways that countries and civil society have reacted to try to get us closer to that implementation, and one of those has been a focus on and a creation of what are called national action plans on Women, Peace, and Security, on the implementation of 1325; countries name them different things. And for those who are not familiar, they are usually basically just a multi-agency strategy, ideally with an implementation plan that spans a range of departments, agencies, and includes any spectrum of things. They can call for more women to be appointed mediators, for more support to women's groups for conflict prevention, meeting the unique physical needs of women in humanitarian crises or refugee camps. Some countries say they want to deploy more women to peacekeeping missions, recruit more female police officers, provide support to people raped during war, training security forces, et cetera. There is a broad range of things that are included in them.

The UN Security Council did pass that first resolution in 2000, so Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace, and Security. But that was, as I think my colleagues have alluded to, only the first in what is now a whole suite of resolutions. I think you have also heard we are a little resolutioned out.

International issues that are resolved traditionally through agreements between states are managed currently through agreements between government agencies and corporate entities. Government agencies and corporate entities are nonstate actors that have no formal capacity to engage in international lawmaking. Are their international agreements a source of international law?

Many, if not most, international legal scholars share the ominous contention that espionage, as a legal field, is devoid of meaning. For them, any attempt to extrapolate the lex lata corpus of the international law of intelligence, let alone its lex scripta, would inevitably prove to be a failed attempt, as there is simply nothing to extrapolate. The notion that international law is moot as to the question of if, when, and how intelligence is to be collected, has been repeated so many times that it has attained the status of a dogma. Professor Afsheen John Radsan, former assistant general cousel to the CIA, has gone so far as to suggest that those academics interested in the very field should “move on to other projects—with grace.” Dr. Lubin began his presentation by gracefully declining Radsan's invitation further challenging the existing discourse for lacking a sufficient degree of intellectual rigor.

Over the last few years, two international organizations launched global networks to connect legal professionals specializing in law as it pertains to climate change. The first textbook on international climate change law was published during this time and a second is was released in 2018. Such developments no doubt reflect the growing prominence of the subject in public discourse and regulatory efforts. More subtly, they point to an emergent community of lawyers working with and generating international climate law as a matter of professional practice.