On 22 June 2022 the Bill of Rights Bill to replace the Human Rights Act 1998 was introduced to the United Kingdom (UK) Parliament. Just over a year later, it was withdrawn. This was not a minor update, as claimed by the Conservative government, but a wholesale revision of a fundamental feature of UK constitutional arrangements. Given that the UK has no codified constitution, it is not out of the ordinary for constitutional change to proceed via ordinary Act of Parliament. But what was unusual was the informal methods used by the government in its attempt to push through its bill of rights. Searching for a word or phrase to capture what happened over this time in the UK is difficult, not only because of the absence of a conventional method for constitutional change. Most scholarship focuses on formal rather than informal processes for amendment. The purpose of this article is therefore to make a contribution towards filling this gap by introducing the phrase ‘autocratic method’ to describe a particular method of constitutional change as opposed to its substance. Using existing scholarship, and examples from other States, a preliminary definition and essential features of the autocratic method are set out. Further detail is gained through a study of the attempted replacement of the Human Rights Act. Whilst the Bill of Rights Bill is no longer going ahead, this episode in UK constitutional history contains important lessons not just for the UK but for any State embarking on a process of constitutional change.

This article offers a reconstruction of how the Court of Justice of the European Union (EU) justifies the territorial scope of application of EU law. Scholarship on this issue tends to advocate for an expansive projection of EU norms in the pursuit of global values, subject to the external limits of public international law. This article will develop a critique of this approach by pointing to its underlying assumptions as to the territorial dimension of the EU's rule, the insoluble practical issues that it leads to, and the need to consider differently the EU's spatial identity and relation to the wider world. It will also be argued that, in fact, other case law sometimes already reflects an alternative vision, by imagining the EU implicitly, not as a ‘global actor’ promoting universal values, but as a concretely situated and spatially bounded community. It will be shown that this is so with the methodological help of private international law, and in particular three doctrines that are traditional to this discipline—the localisation of cross-border relations, international imperativeness, and the public policy exception. This will ultimately allow for a more sophisticated understanding of the EU's territory to emerge—irreducible to the physical coordinates of its acts of intervention, or the mere sum of the physical spaces under Member State sovereignty, but as a distinct space of social relations, informed and delineated by the particular axiology and structure of the EU legal system.

This article offers a reconstruction and assessment of the emerging rebellion of European constitutional courts against the exceptionless supremacy of European Union (EU) law. It presents the ontological theories of supremacy and how the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) overcame the first two major challenges of its history: the existential challenge of canonizing the general doctrine of supremacy and the Solange challenge of national fundamental rights. It provides an account of the emerging ultra vires challenge, including its root cause and evolvement, and provides an assessment and sets out proposals. The article demonstrates that the crux of the matter is not the primacy of EU law but the interpretive primacy of the CJEU. It argues that the rebellion was triggered by the perception that the CJEU case law features a declining normative and an increasing policy character. The debate about the CJEU's evolutionary interpretation, in a certain sense, parallels US constitutional law's debate between originalism and the living constitution, with the difference that the EU is a pluralist legal order.

For societies transitioning from conflict to peace, the phenomenon of child soldiers poses significant challenges. These include quandaries associated with assisting in the reintegration of serving child soldiers, determining how to prevent future recruitment of child soldiers, and pursuing accountability of those who utilize child soldiers. In addition, questions are also raised as to whether and how child soldiers responsible for crimes committed during conflict are to be held to account. While no one mechanism or response can adequately and sufficiently address the multifaceted issues that arise, peace agreements, as foundational documents that serve as the blueprint for peacebuilding and the post-conflict State, can make a useful contribution to some or all of them. Drawing on all references to child soldiers in 77 peace agreements signed between 1990 and 2022, this article examines the ways in which peace agreements address the issue of child soldiers.

This article adopts a critical approach towards scholarship seeking to identify binding due diligence obligations for States in cyberspace. The article demonstrates that due diligence obligations are anchored in specific primary rules and are not a universal standalone source from which it is possible to derive binding obligations for all areas of activity. The consensus position of States in United Nations fora clearly determines that due diligence in cyberspace is a voluntary, non-binding norm of responsible State behaviour, and there is currently insufficient State practice and opinio juris to support the development of a customary rule containing binding due diligence obligations in cyberspace. Consequently, the article concludes that attempts to establish binding due diligence obligations in cyberspace constitute lex ferenda that may be understood as an interventionist attempt by scholars to fill what they perceive to be dangerous legal gaps.

This article explores the constitutional regulation of birthright ius soli citizenship in two Latin American countries which restrict access to citizenship for the children of foreigners deemed to be passing through the countries. Access to citizenship is a significant marker of membership, setting the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion within and across States. Choosing the cases of Chile and Colombia, this article uses historical, institutional and comparative analysis in order to excavate the evolving conceptions of citizenship in those two countries, with particular reference to the concepts of the ‘transient foreigner’ and of ‘domicile’. The case studies provide an excellent laboratory within which to examine the evolution of constitutional ideas of citizenship and ‘the people’. In Colombia, the outcome of the investigation shows that there is unlikely to be significant long-term change in the citizenship regime towards a more generalised acceptance of unconditional ius soli, notwithstanding the substantial shorter-term measures taken to accommodate the children of undocumented migrants from Venezuela and to respond to international pressure. In Chile, combined with other ongoing constitutional work in the citizenship space as part of a wider reform process, there may be a slow journey towards a different constitutional future for so-called ‘transient foreigners’ and others excluded within the State, but this is currently stalled. Chile has, however, introduced legislation cementing a more limited concept of ‘transient foreigner’, linking this work on citizenship to the wider domain of migration governance.

Multilateral development banks (MDBs) are international organizations subject to the law of international responsibility. Yet, the relationship between their accountability mechanisms and the International Law Commission (ILC) Articles on the Responsibility of International Organizations (ARIO) remains unclear. Understanding this relationship is essential in fully realizing the right to remedy in the development finance context. A comparative analysis of these legal frameworks clarifies that notwithstanding their different rationale, scope and functions, the two are not normatively conflicting and both serve to control public power. While the accountability mechanisms correct the ARIO's State-centric orientation by granting legal standing to project-affected people, they have their own deficiency concerning the actions they can prescribe to MDBs upon a finding of noncompliance. Highlighting that the MDBs’ mandate to ‘do no harm’ and pursue sustainable development is left unfulfilled by the accountability mechanisms’ deficient remedial function, this article identifies specific ARIO provisions to complement rather than undermine the MDBs’ accountability system. The ARIO's residual character, combined with the proposition that remedies arise not only from wrongful conduct but also from harm suffered by one party due to another's risky activities, justify this complementarity.

This article revisits the overlooked field of comparative environmental law. It examines contributions to this field from the late 1960s to 2022, highlighting the methodologies proposed, their shortcomings, the main aspects and angles taken by the literature, and the curious lack of engagement by experts in comparative law proper with environmental law systems. On the basis of a structured examination of the literature, the article extracts four main aims or purposes that may guide this line of research: (i) clarifying the initial system by contrasting it with a foreign system; (ii) using the basic conceptual features of a known system to analyse and understand a foreign unknown system; (iii) evaluating and fine-tuning a system or an aspect thereof; and (iv) extracting analytical categories that can serve to map the entire field or areas of it.

Remote-access cyber espionage operations against activists, dissidents or human rights defenders abroad are increasingly a feature of digital transnational repression. This arises when State or State-related actors use digital technologies to silence or stifle dissent from human rights defenders, activists and dissidents abroad through the collection of confidential information that is then weaponized against the target or their networks. Examples include the targeting of Ghanem Al-Masarir (a Saudi dissident living in the United Kingdom), Carine Kanimba (a United States–Belgian dual citizen and daughter of Rwandan activist Paul Rusesabagina living in the United States) and Omar Abdulaziz (another Saudi dissident living in Canada) with NSO Group's mercenary spyware. This practice erodes human rights, democracy and the rule of law and has a negative impact on targeted communities, including social isolation, self-censorship, the fragmentation and impairment of transnational political and social advocacy networks, and psychological and social harm. Despite this, international law does little to restrain this practice. Building on momentum around the regulation of mercenary spyware and transnational repression, this article elaborates on how States could consider regulating dissident cyber espionage and streamlines a unified approach among ratifying States addressing issues such as State immunity, burden of proof, export control and international and public–private sector collaboration.