China has become an active treaty-maker by entering into a large number of bilateral, trilateral and multilateral treaties. More recently, China has been actively engaged in some high-profile negotiations with the EU, the United States and ASEAN, with the aim of expanding its economic network. However, China’s treaty behaviours have come under scrutiny. This chapter aims to conceptualize China’s treaty behaviours through some case studies, including the Joint Declaration of the Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the Government of the People’s Republic of China on the Question of Hong Kong, China’s signing of the International Convention on Civil and Political Rights and the UN Convention of State Immunity and International Legal Order. These case studies indicate China’s paradox in treaty-making. While it attempts to legalize its political will through treaty-making, its enforcement of these treaties may be subject to a politicalized endeavour.

The author explores how consent functions as commitment, content, and constitution for international agreements. He argues that consent constructs all forms of international commitment. Consent elucidates an agreement’s contents – what the agreement ‘is’ in terms of scope and substance. Consent can also function as a constitution – delimiting not only ‘primary’ rules encapsulated by an agreement’s existence and contents, but ‘secondary rules’ determining who can make agreements, how they must do so, and ways to recognize, adjust, and end them. For all these functions, consent remains an under-examined and undifferentiated concept. Today, almost any of consent’s functions can be established by almost any formal or informal means. Alongside existing proposals (presumptions/defaults and content-based criteria), this chapter proposes that international law should pursue more – and different – formalities for consent. Having different forms of consent follow its different functions may, according to the author, improve the efficacy of consent and with it the efficacy of international agreements overall.

The author explores how the Court of Justice of the European Union (hereafter CJEU) has dealt with issues of consent as a trigger of commitment in the context of treaty-making by focusing on its practice pertaining to informal arrangements concluded between the European Union and third parties. The main arguments advanced in the chapter are: (a) that the Court has largely followed mainstream international legal thinking by identifying consent as the ‘objective’ common intention of its authors to be legally bound; and (b) that the Court has acknowledged the constitutive function of consent when it comes to treaty-making with non-State actors. The chapter also illustrates an important blind spot in the current debate on consent. The examination of the CJEU’s case law shows that political factors may have a bearing on the ascertainment of the consent to be legally bound. This, in turn, entails that attempts at theorizing how international law can remain sociologically clever and keep pace with current developments on the ground should be cognizant of the danger of over-relying on judicial practice.

This chapter discusses the basics of the law of treaties: what they are, how they are concluded, what efefcts they generate, and how they are to be terminated. It is built around the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

This chapter examines the sponsorship by the politically powerful Buxton family of the disastrous Niger expedition, which sought to harness medical advances, new geographic knowledge and the power of steamships, to send three steamships down the River Niger to negotiate treaties with African chiefs whereby chiefs would agree to end the slave trade and in return receive trade boats from Britain. Secretly, the expedition was also supposed to purchase territory and lay the foundations for a cotton plantation funded by British investors. The chapter examines the extent to which the expedition was a family enterprise, as well as exploring the ideological assumptions of the expedition, opposition to it, and the importance of the marriage between humanitarianism and colonialism that it represented. The failure of the expedition marked a turning point in the power of abolitionist families. For example, the expedition was opposed by Chartist activists in the name of popular power and opposition to the focus of elite families on suffering others overseas rather than on the British poor. Debate over the Niger Expedition thus presaged the growth of settler populism, and marked an important turning point in the history of empire, kinship and violence told by this book.

This chapter engages with the contributions of Indigenous peoples in North America to a jurisprudence of entanglement, as expressed through historic treaties between colonists and Indigenous peoples. A prevalent contemporary view understands treaties as a form of negotiated co-existence in which, contract-like, different parties agree to exchange – or share – land, resources and jurisdiction. Treaties could thus be seen to provide interface norms for two legal orders, otherwise strangers to each other, which might now become entangled. However, a body of Indigenous scholarship on the resurgent treaty tradition shows up the liberal philosophical premises embedded in this understanding of legal pluralism and the entanglement of norms. Instead, from this perspective, treaties are a recognition that we are always and already in relationship. Further, the key tenets of that principle are that relationships themselves emerge from the more primal way our lifeworld is made up of symbiotic ecosystems. Entanglement in the context of treaties is thus a phenomenon of a different order than conventional legal pluralism: it is simply characteristic of an ontology of which law is a part. The larger implications of this for an ecologically grounded law are explored in conversation with occidental philosophies of entanglement.

This chapter continues to focus on procedural rules in Chinese BITs. Classic issues in international commercial arbitration such as parallel proceedings also emerge in international investment arbitration. The parallel existence of international investment arbitration and domestic litigation deserves careful analysis for the sake of international legal certainty and security. Given the small number of international investment arbitration cases involving China and its BITs, the issue of parallel proceedings in Chinese BIT law and practice is underinvestigated. The chapter looks into this issue by reference to the case of Hela Schwarz GmbH v. PR China, an ongoing BIT arbitration case registered with the ICSID. Some improvements have been made to relevant jurisdictional clauses in China’s more recent free trade agreements, filling the gap in this gray area.

This chapter discusses the basics of the law of treaties: what they are, how they are concluded, what effects they generate, and how they are to be terminated. It is built around the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties

The significance of the treaty made at Waitangi in 1840 has consistently been exaggerated by historians. All the British players involved in making it were preoccupied with the momentary diplomatic task of persuading the chiefs to cede sovereignty to the British Crown. The inclusion in the agreement of a clause confirming the natives in the possession of their lands did not spring from the British government’s instructions but from the influence of local rather than metropolitan actors and forces. Moreover, with one exception, there is no contemporary evidence that any parties attached the significance to the first clause of its second article that was attributed to it later. What is more, the British government eventually claimed possession of the larger part of New Zealand on the very same basis as it had assumed possession of New South Wales in 1788, namely the doctrine of discovery. The way in which critical matters relating to land title were treated at the imperial centre was fundamentally a function of political power and could readily change according to circumstances. The government bowed to the pressure that a group of adventurers, the New Zealand Company, was able to exert in parliament and the press.