Recent case law has evidenced doctrinal ambiguity concerning whether State immunity precludes domestic courts’ jurisdiction when rights and interests of third-party States may be affected. This article posits that such confusion arises from a failure to recognize State immunity as a rule predicated on the sovereign status of the defendant. Through an analysis of State practice, the article contends that the concept of indirect impleading incorporated in the United Nations Convention on State Immunity does not challenge the status-based nature of this rule. Construing State immunity as a subject-matter rule erroneously conflates it with distinct doctrines, such as Monetary Gold and the act of State doctrine.

The UK Supreme Court's decision in Belhaj v Straw defined foreign affairs non-justiciability and unearthed its constitutional foundations. However, two decisions since Belhaj—High Commissioner for Pakistan v Prince Muffakham Jah and The Law Debenture Trust Corpn plc v Ukraine—have called Belhaj into doubt, narrowing non-justiciability to give effect to ordinary private law rights. This article analyses these decisions and argues that their general approach of subjecting issues involving transactions between sovereign States to private international law's framework is desirable, because the constitutional foundations of non-justiciability identified in Belhaj are shaky. Yet, it is suggested that private international law itself may require courts to exercise judicial restraint on these issues, given its goal of upholding the efficient resolution of international disputes in appropriate fora.

This article addresses some of the changes in international law and foreign relations law which have impinged on the operation of the State Immunity Act 1978 in the first 40 years of its operation and some of the ways in which it has been supplemented by judicial decisions. It addresses, in particular, the initial need for legislation in this field, the circumstances in which agents of a State may be entitled to immunity, the relationship between State immunity in domestic law and Article 6 of the European Convention on Human Rights and Article 47 of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights, the relationship of State immunity and rules of jus cogens, and the respective scope of State immunity and principles of non-justiciability.

English courts have historically been wary of deciding cases that rest on contested findings of fact about the practices and doctrines of religions. This is particularly true in defamation cases. However, the recent case of Shergill and others v Khaira and others [2014] UKSC 33 in the UK Supreme Court has narrowed the principle of non-justiciability on the grounds of subject matter. Defamation cases such as Blake v Associated Newspapers Limited [2003] EWHC 1960 (QB) have treated religious doctrine and practice as matters not justiciable per se, even if a determination is essential for the exercise of private or public law rights and obligations. The Supreme Court indicated in Khaira that it may be appropriate for courts to treat such disputes as justiciable. The common law, domestic statute and the European Convention on Human Rights protect the right to reputation, and Khaira indicates that it is time that defamation claims resting on disputes about religious doctrine and practice were entertained by the courts to a much greater extent than recent cases have allowed. However, the judgment has left open the possibility of some religious disputes still being non-justiciable.

This article reviews the history and politics of the English foreign act of State and non-justiciability doctrines in light of recent judgments in Belhaj and Rahmatullah. It argues that the doctrines have a political unconscious—a term borrowed from literary theorist Fredric Jameson—and that an appreciation of this should inform the Supreme Court's approach to the forthcoming appeals.

For decades it has been authoritatively stressed that non-justiciability of defence and foreign affairs represents one of the major hurdles to the application of international law by domestic courts. Until now, however, international law scholarship seems to have overlooked two aspects of this issue. First, it has not been sufficiently highlighted that the international and the European community legal orders are progressively eroding the scope of application of these non-justiciability doctrines. Second, it has rarely been shown how judicial intervention in international matters can be prevented from turning into the ‘judicialization’ of foreign policy. Hence, ideally by moving along the path traced by those who have already dealt with this issue, the present work aims to analyse these two aspects in greater depth.