This article discusses the importance of the recently concluded Paris Rulebook, the extent to which it limits national discretion, instils discipline and generates ambition and accountability, and the challenges that lie ahead in implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement. It discusses, in particular, the rules on mitigation, transparency, the global stocktake and the implementation and compliance mechanism, in order to highlight the choices Parties made on three overarching issues that have long bedevilled the climate change regime—prescriptiveness (the level of detail of the rules), legal bindingness (the extent to which particular rules are legally binding) and differentiation (the extent to which particular rules accommodate differences between Parties or apply uniformly to all Parties).

This article analyses both cooperative and confrontational interactions between domestic judges and UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies. Based on a number of cases collected through multiple databases, this article addresses the basis on which the monitoring bodies encourage the domestic acceptance of their views, general comments, and reports; how domestic courts engage with these findings; on what basis; and why some courts are more willing to engage with these findings. A key argument is that judicial accommodation is highly selective; domestic judges occasionally avoid, discount, and contest the interpretation put forward by the treaty monitoring bodies and thereby pose a challenge to their legitimacy.

The liberal political thought has shaped views on normativity in international law by insisting on rule neutrality and determinacy through the sources doctrine and the idea of a clear-cut normative threshold. The present debate over the normative quality of diplomatic assurances poses an extraordinary challenge to these ideals. Moreover, any attempt to qualify the assurances as soft law further illustrates the manipulation of normativity-talk through the narratives of normative expansion and communitarisation. Ultimately, the liberal project cannot fulfill its promises, leaving international lawyers disenchanted.