International Legal Commitments Research Articles

The World Health Organization was born as a normative agency: Seventy-five years of global health law under WHO governance.

The World Health Organization (WHO) was born as a normative agency and has looked to global health law to structure collective action to realize global health with justice. Framed by its constitutional authority to act as the directing and coordinating authority on international health, WHO has long been seen as the central actor in the development and implementation of global health law. However, WHO has faced challenges in advancing law to prevent disease and promote health over the past 75 years, with global health law constrained by new health actors, shifting normative frameworks, and soft law diplomacy. These challenges were exacerbated amid the COVID-19 pandemic, as states neglected international legal commitments in national health responses. Yet, global health law reforms are now underway to strengthen WHO governance, signaling a return to lawmaking for global health. Looking back on WHO's 75th anniversary, this article examines the central importance of global health law under WHO governance, reviewing the past successes, missed opportunities, and future hopes for WHO. For WHO to meet its constitutional authority to become the normative agency it was born to be, we offer five proposals to reestablish a WHO fit for purpose: normative instruments, equity and human rights mainstreaming, sustainable financing, One Health, and good governance. Drawing from past struggles, these reforms will require further efforts to revitalize hard law authorities in global health, strengthen WHO leadership across the global governance landscape, uphold equity and rights at the center of global health law, and expand negotiations in global health diplomacy.

Public Opinion and Drone Exports: Evidence from a Conjoint Experiment in the United States

Abstract Drones are now a mainstay in war. Yet not all countries can manufacture armed and networked drones, heightening global demand. While some drone-manufacturing countries have adopted permissive export policies, U.S. policymakers have been more restrictive, citing international legal commitments and domestic export controls. In this study, I consider drone exports as a question of both political economy and public opinion. I derive and test hypotheses about public support for drone exports through a conjoint survey experiment administered in the United States. I find that perceived alignment between the recipient country and United States, as well as the intended use of drones, are the most important factors shaping public support for drone exports. Export control measures are less relevant to public opinion. These findings offer the first experimental evidence about public opinion for drone exports, which have implications for the political economy of security and policies relating to the export of military technologies.

Challenges in protecting Rohingya refugees: Pathways for international intervention

This study examines the efficacy of international legal frameworks in preventing human rights abuses against the Rohingya in Myanmar. Despite global human rights conventions, the ongoing crisis highlights a stark disconnect between international norms and their enforcement. The study scrutinizes the limitations of key international bodies, particularly the United Nations Security Council (UNSC), and the challenges posed by national sovereignty and geopolitical dynamics that hinder effective human rights protection. Utilizing qualitative analysis of existing literature, this research identifies the systemic shortcomings within international mechanisms and the inadequate application of the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle in Myanmar's context. The findings suggest an urgent need for reform within international legal frameworks and the implementation of more effective measures to uphold human rights universally and ensure the safeguarding of vulnerable groups like the Rohingya. The paper concludes with recommendations to strengthen international legal measures, increased accountability for human rights violators, and a more assertive global stance against violations, aiming to bridge the gap between international legal commitments and real-world implementation.

International Obligation to Counter Gender Apartheid in Afghanistan

The following article was first published in the Columbia Law Journal and is reproduced with permission and an updated introduction.
 Since they returned to power in August 2021, the Taliban are again imposing a regime of gender apartheid in Afghanistan in violation of international law, just as they did in the 1990s. Given that it is pervasively discriminatory, gender apartheid poses specific human rights problems requiring particular, heightened responses. A system of governance based on subordination of women institutionalizes sex discrimination across state political, legal, and cultural infrastructures. It necessitates different counter-strategies.
 This article suggests conceptual architecture for analyzing and responding to this aspect of the current Afghan crisis. Specifically, the robust international legal framework that helped end racial apartheid should be urgently adapted to address gender apartheid and concert the responses of other states to it. 
 There are three principal arguments in favor of this approach. 1) It is essential for fulfilling states’ international legal commitments on sex discrimination across every document in the International Bill of Human Rights, as well as the specific target they affirmed in the Sustainable Development Goals to achieve gender equality by 2030. 2) Any other stance leads to an unacceptable imbalance in the manner in which international law addresses discrimination on the bases of sex and race. 3) This may be the only way to effectively tackle systematic Taliban abuses, as the organization is deeply committed to its violations of women’s rights and already sanctioned by the United Nations Security Council. Such an approach marshals the resources of the international community to constrain the Taliban, and is the best hope for ensuring the credibility, legitimacy and effectiveness of the international legal response.

Integrating international policy standards in the implementation of postnatal care: a rapid review

IntroductionInternational legal and political documents can assist policy-makers and programme managers in countries to create an enabling environment to promote maternal and newborn health. This review aimed to map and...

Evaluation of the progress of international integration of Vietnamese higher education: Approach from quality assurance activities

International integration is a prominent topic of Vietnamese higher education in the 21st century. Considered a main pillar, international integration in higher education has taken place in many fields, from development of networks, models, innovation of content and training programs, university administration to building comprehensive international cooperation strategy. Quality assurance activities have become the focus of state management agencies and training institutions. Using the historical educational research method, with a specialized approach, this article evaluates the process of developing quality assurance activities in Vietnamese higher education. The results show that Vietnamese higher education has changed from quality control method to quality assurance method. This change process represents an effort to integrate higher education according to regional and world standards. Quality assurance activities in Vietnamese higher education are currently at the stage of applying common rules and regulations of international higher education, in accordance with Vietnamese interests; Vietnamese higher education is trying to go beyond normal international cooperation, demonstrating responsibility and legal commitments to participate in the globalization process in the field of higher education.

Public Regulation and People’s Welfare Orientations of Indonesia’s Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the Mining Industry

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is an important topic in the intersections between businesses and the society, being used to address the negative effects of corporate and business activities on the society and environment. Regardless of the variants of its definition and forms, CSR has been used as a form of regulation in many countries including Indonesia. Indonesia’s mining industry has a unique CSR regulation in the sense that it is backed by sectoral mining regulations used to protect certain uniquely defined societal interests. Since Indonesia’s mining regulation prescribes certain manners of mineral production, mandatory CSR obligations have been created for industry players that will have to be read in the light of public regulation and people’s welfare orientations. This paper finds that the expansive use of CSR particularly in the mining regulatory framework will create implications for the international legal commitments undertaken by Indonesia including those under the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Towards a ‘security-centred’ energy transition: balancing the European Union’s ambitions and geopolitical realities

Abstract The European Union (EU) faces a pressing, multi-level energy crisis propelled by the perfect storm of Russia’s war in Ukraine and rapidly progressing climate change. As a result, the EU is scrambling to ensure it has sufficient energy supplies for the foreseeable future while reinventing its energy strategy in the long term. Since the EU is at a critical juncture for squaring EU energy security with European and international legal commitments, this article surveys this radical shift and its consequences. It analyses new EU-wide crisis-response tools and ad hoc bilateral arrangements with third countries against existing legal commitments. Recent developments are only the beginning of a much larger re-evaluation of core notions of the ‘trade-energy security’ nexus. To decarbonize, the EU must move towards a ‘security-centred’ energy transition, premised on ‘security first, compliance second’. This requires reassessing the notion of ‘protectionism’ in geopolitically sensitive areas and the current division of energy competences between the EU and its Member States.

Regulating Global Climate Change: From Common Concern to Planetary Concern

Since the recognition by the UN General Assembly resolution 43/53 (6 December 1988) that “climate change is a common concern of mankind” as well as adoption of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, climate change has emerged as one of the most pressing global environmental challenges. The IPCC AR6 (April 2022) curated scientific evidence has explicitly observed that “Net anthropogenic GHG emissions have increased since 2010 across all major sectors globally.” The cumulative effect of GHG emissions appears to exacerbate the abnormal weather events, melting the polar ice caps and cause other cataclysmic climatic changes. The effects of climate change transcend territorial boundaries and continents. It has provided a normative basis for the concerted international law-making process underneath the existing UNFCCC led global regulatory regime. It designated climate change as a common concern of humankind. The resultant soft normativity has been shaped into the hard law through the trajectory of three international legal instruments that took the forms such as common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities (1992 UNFCCC) to international legal commitments only for Annex I countries (1997 Kyoto Protocol) and the nationally determined commitments by the parties (2015 Paris Agreement). This study has sought to place under scanner the graded evolution of the climate change regime through the in-built law-making process premised upon a common concern of humankind. In the aftermath of the UN Secretary-General’s warning about climate emergency as part of “triple planetary crisis”, it is high time the international law scholars, the UN General Assembly and the UNFCCC regulatory process shift into the higher trajectory of climate change as a planetary concern.

Defense treaties increase domestic support for military action and casualty tolerance: Evidence from survey experiments in the United States

ABSTRACT Do security guarantees affect people's willingness to spend their country's “blood and treasure” in a military crisis? Recent research finds that international legal commitments reshape domestic policy preferences. However, the focus of that scholarship is traditionally on issues such as human rights that define a society's normative obligations. In this study, we deploy two original survey experiments in the United States describing a potential military crisis on the Korean peninsula. We find that increasing the salience of the 1953 agreement between Washington and Seoul increases support for military action and that individuals become both more tolerant of U.S. military deaths and North Korean civilian casualties. In addition, the breadth of these effects increases when individuals are provided more detail about the agreement. These results extend the analysis of international law and domestic preferences into the domain of national security politics.

Military Alliances and Public Support for War

AbstractHow do military alliances affect public support for war to defend victims of aggression? We offer the first experimental evidence on this fundamental question. Our experiments revealed that alliance commitments greatly increased the American public's willingness to intervene abroad. Alliances shaped public opinion by increasing public fears about the reputational costs of nonintervention and by heightening the perceived moral obligation to intervene out of concerns for fairness and loyalty. Finally, although alliances swayed public opinion across a wide range of circumstances, they made the biggest difference when the costs of intervention were high, the stakes of intervention were low, and the country needing aid was not a democracy. Thus, alliances can create pressure for war even when honoring the commitment would be extremely inconvenient, which could help explain why democratic allies tend to be so reliable. These findings shed new light on the consequences of alliances and other international legal commitments, the role of morality in foreign policy, and ongoing debates about domestic audience costs.

Enforcement through Coercion: American Economic Sanctions and International Human Rights Standards

Though centralized enforcement of global human rights standards is weak, powerful states can act unilaterally to punish rights violations. Focusing on the United States, which is the most frequent `sender' of sanctions for human rights, we theorize how the incentives for sanctions differ across the legislative and executive branches of government, as well as how the legal foundation for sanctions vary across issue area. Employing a new fine-grained dataset of US economic coercion, we examine the conditions under which---and the consistency with which---the United States employs sanctions for human rights. We show that certain human rights issues, characterized by interbranch agreement and domestic policy externalities, give rise to systems of `dedicated' enforcement where violations are systematically monitored and punishment is more likely. In other more politically-contentious areas, US human rights enforcement is more ad hoc, but nevertheless responds at the margins to international legal commitments: when countries ratify certain certain global human rights treaties, they are more likely to be targeted by US sanctions in the event of rights violations.

The EU in Search for Stronger Enforcement Rules: Assessing the Proposed Amendments to Trade Enforcement Regulation 654/2014

Abstract Considering the new focus of the European Union (EU) trade policy on strengthening the enforcement of trade rules, the article presents the proposed amendments to the EU Trade Enforcement Regulation 654/2014. It analyzes the EU Commission proposal and the amendments suggested by the European Parliament Committee on International Trade (INTA), in particular with regard to uncooperative third parties and the provision of immediate countermeasures. The amendments will be assessed in view of their legality under World Trade Organization (WTO), Free Trade Agreement (FTA), and general international law and in view of their political implications for the EU’s multilateralist stance. Finally, the opportunity to amend Regulation 654/2014 to use it for the enforcement of FTA trade and sustainable development chapters will be explored. The analysis shows that the shift towards more effective enforcement should be pursued with due care for respecting existing international legal commitments and with more caution to multilateralism.

Legal Perspectives on Solidarity Crime in Italy

AbstractThis article investigates the political and legal dimension of Italian policy management of migratory crises affecting the European Union and member states. It pays particular attention to the tightening of migrant reception measures from 2016 until 2019. In this dynamic, it argues that the 132/18 governmental legislation “Decree‐Law on Immigration and Security” of 2018 (and the Decree‐Law bis of 2019) represents a breakthrough. The article reveals the shift of solidarity crime from a political to a legal dimension. The unprecedented movement of migrants and refugees into the EU has led to widespread claims for a EU common migratory policy based on international cooperation and equitable sharing of responsibilities. As a frontline member state, Dublin III prescribes to Italy responsibilities in rescue, first safe of migrants, and refugee status determination. Italy’s migration policy thus conflicts with its prior international legal commitments, and, for this reason, its concrete applicability is highly debated.

The Unacceptable Spectre of Under-Aged Forced Marriage in Turkey

In many respects, Turkey is an exception among Muslim countries. Whilst being a secular democratic state, Turkey still struggles, however, with some remnants of its religious and socio-cultural heritage. The issue of forced marriage of children is one of those issues. Marriage is commonly defined as a union concluded by parties with their full and free consent. If consent is lacking, a forced marriage occurs. In the case of a forced marriage, consent is lacking because one of the prospective spouses does not give her/his consent freely, or sometimes because she/he is incapable of giving consent because of her/his age. As a founding member of the Council of Europe, Turkey not only ratified the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) in 1954 and Protocol Nr. 1, but it has also ratified many of the core international documents on human rights and the rights of children, such as the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women. Nevertheless, the forced marriage of children is still a prevalent social problem in Turkey, and in the majority of cases, girls are the victims of such practices. This article examines the factors behind the forced marriage of children in Turkey, while exploring the current legal background and Turkey’s international legal commitments to fight against such practices. Finally, the article suggests the reinforcement of available legal remedies in order to prevent the forced marriage of children

Is Migration a Coherent Field of International Law? The Example of Labor Migration

A critical characteristic of migration is that it involves people in all their complexity, and with all their complex needs. Therefore, migration, perhaps more than any other field of international law, is difficult to separate as a body of law from human rights, trade, taxation, investment, health, security, etc. In this brief essay, I will describe two critical, and distinct, linkages that prevent us from cabining migration as a separate field. Both arise in the area of labor migration. Indeed, it is through linkage with other fields of international law, such as trade and investment, that states could establish international legal commitments to liberalize migration.

International law, military effectiveness, and public support for drone strikes

Despite the increased emphasis on domestic politics in the study of international law, scholars remain divided about whether and how international law affects domestic institutions. Moreover, while public support is a core ingredient for sustainable, legitimate policies in a democracy, research at the individual level of analysis remains limited. Weighing in on these areas of study, we investigate the use of drone strikes for counterterrorism, a subject of considerable debate. Proponents in the government point to drones as both effective for disrupting terrorist networks and compatible with international law. Critics from groups such as international organizations (IOs) and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) respond that attacks create more terrorists than they kill and violate legal commitments. The central question we ask in this article is whether these international legal criticisms impact public support for drone strikes, the centerpiece of US counterterrorism policy, or whether individuals are more persuaded by effectiveness-based arguments. Employing a survey experiment of a nationally representative sample of the United States, we find IO and NGO criticisms can shape public attitudes even around an important national security issue like drone strikes, but are most influential when messages center on legal critiques rather than matters of effectiveness. Our findings speak to fundamental questions about the domestic politics of international legal commitments, the role of IOs and NGOs in shaping political debates, and the durability of US counterterrorism policy.

Withdrawing from Investment Treaties but Protecting Investment

AbstractA backlash against Investor State Dispute Settlement (ISDS), in which multinational corporations can sue governments, has led some states to unilaterally withdraw from some of the thousands of investment treaties that facilitate ISDS. But thanks to redundancies in the dense, decentralized network of investment treaties, states can reject some treaty commitments to ISDS and maintain most (if not all) international legal protections for foreign investors. In this article, we explain the source of redundancies, document the group of states that have taken advantage of unilateral withdrawal, and demonstrate that states can recalibrate their international legal commitments without eschewing contemporary international investment law.

The Bali Nine, Capital Punishment and Australia's Obligation to Seek Abolition

The executions of Australian nationals Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran in April 2015 brought capital punishment to the forefront of public consciousness in Australia. Indonesia carried out their death sentences, and those of six others convicted of drug offences, despite Australia's determined advocacy for clemency. Their deaths represent a tiny fraction of the numbers killed in execution of the death penalty each year, but ought to prompt a renewed inquiry into the global practice of capital punishment and Australia's position in relation to it. This article identifies the states which continue to impose the death penalty and those which oppose it. It then situates capital punishment as a human rights issue, and explores how Australia can fully undertake its international legal commitments through more prominent and effective advocacy for the abolition of the death penalty worldwide.

Solidarity and sharing in the Common European Asylum System: the case of Syrian refugees

ABSTRACTAlthough the vast majority of Syrians flee to neighboring countries, an increasing number is trying to reach European soil. On one end of the spectrum, individuals escape their war-torn country seeking protection elsewhere and on the other end the European Union (EU) and its Members States bear specific obligations for granting protection, stemming from their international and regional legal commitments. Drawing from the UNHCR estimations that the exodus is evolving rapidly and in light of Article 80 TFEU and the objectives by the European Council, the EU needs to adopt policies which emphasize the full and inclusive application of the 1951 Refugee Convention and promote a fair distribution of asylum-related responsibilities amongst EU states. The present article investigates how the Syrian refugee crisis triggers practices of sharing within the EU. It describes how the different EU sharing mechanisms have been responding to the asylum-related pressures and critically analyzes their distributive effects. The main proposition is that the way in which sharing is being understood in the European asylum policies and applied in the areas covered by those policies (protection and treatment of individuals, European agencies’ role, relations between the EU and third countries) has significant consequences on the institution of asylum and the protection granted.