Notion Of International Law Research Articles

Unity, Charity, and Fraternity as Foundations for International Law in Francisco Suárez

The Jesuit philosopher and theologian, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617), believed the common rational nature of all human beings provides the foundation for both the natural law and international law. He also believed that the human race has a certain unity supported by the principles of mutual love and mercy. This article shows how the unity of the human race and the theological virtue of charity provide a basis for Suárez’s notion of international law. The article situates Suárez within the Catholic tradition of Aquinas and Vitoria, and it distinguishes between the natural law and the law of nations. The final part of the article shows how Suárez’s principles of human unity, charity, and fraternity are affirmed by recent popes.

Demystifying Autonomy: Tracing the International Law Origins of the EU Principle of Autonomy

AbstractCJEU case law has long emphasized the autonomy of the EU legal order, recently triggering the foreclosure of intra-EU investment arbitration. Though academic discourse has treated this as a European peculiarity, autonomy is not unfamiliar to international law as an inherent attribute of all international organizations (IOs). This Article traces how the CJEU employed this as the basis for the development of a legal principle of significant constitutional role in safeguarding the EU’s jurisdictional integrity. First, It considers the EU conception of autonomy on the basis of two identified dimensions of IOs’ autonomy under international law. Political autonomy characterizes the scope of an IO’s powers and its independent legal personality. Institutional autonomy denotes its (im)permeability to external norms. Second, the Article examines autonomy’s different normative status under international and EU law as a legal notion and a constitutional principle, respectively. Rather than viewing the latter as an EU invention, it amounts to a Pygmalian judicial creation—the CJEU drew inspiration from a notion of international law and adapted it within the Union framework. The Article justifies these adaptations by reference to international law in light of the EU’s institutional-judicial architecture and the intertwining of autonomy with, inter alia, Article 2 TEU values.

The Jurisdictional Vacuum: Transnational Corporate Human Rights Claims in Common Law Home States

Abstract Private MNCs that operate in developing host states through overseas subsidiaries are regularly accused of human rights and environmental violations. Host state plaintiffs who then seek redress in home states where a corporate parent is domiciled face a number of doctrinal limitations. Focusing on the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada, this Article outlines the current state of common law doctrines that consistently inhibit host state plaintiffs from advancing transnational home state claims. Cumulatively, the doctrines create a ‘jurisdictional vacuum,’ illustrating that domestic legal principles have not kept pace with commerce that spans across state borders. As international business has been able to structure itself to avoid the adjudicative reach of home state courts, harmed host state plaintiffs are unable to utilize domestic common laws to exact civil liability and obtain compensation. Comprised mainly of transnational claims that originate in commercial activities in the extractive and manufacturing industries, the vacuum’s doctrinal limitations fall within two broad categories. In the first category, home state courts have parochially interpreted corporate legal personality. Adhering to the corporate veil, they have disaggregated otherwise integrated transnational business operations in accordance with the entity theory of liability. They have also disaggregated MNC liability from government and individual liability by, respectively, holding onto ‘statist’ notions of international law and restrictively construing corporate personhood. In the second category, home state courts have taken restrained approaches to transnational corporate claims that implicate foreign relations or trade and investment or, otherwise, impinge on a host state’s judicial system. They have routinely invoked deferential and prudential doctrines, namely forum non conveniens and act of state, and restrictively interpreted the presumption against extraterritoriality. And when they have eschewed restraint in boomerang litigation, the end result has equally thwarted the ability of host state plaintiffs to procure compensatory remedies.

Exploration of the Roman Notions of International Law

Exploration of the Roman Notions of International Law

The Entangled Sovereignties of Air Police: Mapping the Boundary of the International and the Imperial

AbstractThe contemporary proliferation of drones and other forms of aerial interventions herald the (re)emergence of air policing as the principal modality for the fabrication of order in the global periphery. Air policing is predominantly framed by international legal analysis as merely ‘killing from above,’ yet this designation obfuscates the concomitant occupation of airspaces entailed by drones and other aerial technologies. Such occupations constitute an assertion of jurisdiction in nominally sovereign airspaces authorised by latent imperial legality. The history of air policing reveals a genealogy of ‘aerial imperial formations,’ enfolded within the abstract airspaces regulated by international law notions of ‘complete and exclusive’ sovereignty. Through a focus on the spatio-legal construction of airspace, this paper proposes a reframing of the nexus of sovereignty, jurisdiction and territory, and suggests that we conceive of the principle of indivisible sovereignty as propounded under

The Rhetoric of Maps: International Law as a Discursive Tool in Visual Arguments

Abstract This article was presented at the workshop on “Borders and Human Rights,” College of Law & Business, Ramat Gan, Israel.Notions of human rights as enshrined in international law have become the “idea of our time”; a “dominant moral narrative by which world politics” is organized; and a powerful “discourse of public persuasion.”Tony Evans, International Human Rights Law as Power/Knowledge, 27 (3) HUM. RTS. Q. 1046 (2005); Meg McLagan, Human Rights, Testimony, and Transnational Publicity, 2 (1) SCHOLAR & FEMINIST ONLINE 1 (2003), available at http://www.barnard.edu/ps/printmmc.htm; Wendy S. Hesford, Human Rights Rhetoric of Recognition, 41 (3) RHETORIC SOC. Q. 282 (2011). With the rise of human rights discourse, we need to ask, how do protagonists make human rights claims? What sort of resources, techniques, and strategies do they use in order to publicize information about human rights abuses and stipulations set out in international law? With the democratization of mapping practices, various individuals, organizations, and governments are increasingly using maps in order to put forth certain social and political claims. This article draws on the sociology of knowledge, science studies, critical cartography, cultural studies, and anthropological studies of law in order to analyze how various international, Palestinian, and Israeli organizations design maps of the West Bank Barrier in accord with assumptions embedded within international law as part of their political and new media activism. Qualitative sociological methods, such as in-depth interviewing, ethnography, and the collection of cartographic material pertaining to the West Bank Barrier, provide the empirical tools to do so. The maps examined here exemplify how universalistic notions of international law and human rights become a powerful rhetorical tool to make various and often incommensurable social and political claims across different maps. At the same time, international human rights law, rather than dictating local mapping practices, becomes inevitably “vernacularized” and combined with local understandings, cultural preferences, and political concerns.

Johann Caspar Bluntschli ? conception du droit international et projet de Confédération européenne (1878)

The controversy between Bluntschli and Lorimer makes up one of the theoretic high points of the debate on the creation of a United States of Europe. Lorimer considered that the interests of European unity and peace would be best served by the creation of a European federal state along with the establishment of a European Army and the reduction of national forces ; whilst on the other hand, Swiss lawyer and politician Bluntschli considered that a unified Europe should take the form of a Confederation of European states, with each state retaining sovereignty. The positions of each are presented, although an emphasis is placed on Bluntschli’s proposal which, he considered responded best to his notion of international law ; although the ethical and universal roots of the latter do allow for the restriction of state sovereignty in certain specific cases. The article demonstrates that the project of confederation and notions of international law are nonetheless complementary and that the European community will in the long term become a part of the Universal State.

The Future of International Law: A Human Rights Perspective – With Some Comments on the Leiden School of International Law

In the past fifty years there have been changes in relation to the nature and sources of international law. Academic lawyers have welcomed these changes, which show a movement away from strict consent as the basis of international law. States and government law advisers have adopted a more conservative approach and emphasize the importance of consent as a basis for international law. Different approaches are apparent in the practice of the Human Rights Council. The Council has focused on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, much to the annoyance of Western states. The developing world sees the Occupied Palestinian Territory in much the same way as the United Nations saw apartheid in South Africa. The International Court of Justice has responded wisely to both these phenomena. It has given cautious approval to new notions of international law, encapsulated in the doctrines of obligations erga omnes and jus cogens. On the subject of Palestine the Court has given an Advisory Opinion which should form the basis for a peaceful settlement of the conflict in the Middle East. Unfortunately the international community has failed to give effect to this opinion.

Grotius and the Skeptics

The BackgroundHugo Grotius (1583-1645) was endowed with remarkable gifts. He shone as a humanist scholar, a poet, and a historian. He was an expert theologian and a leading politician in his native Holland, and in these capacities actively involved in the theological and political conflicts in the Netherlands of his time. He was also preeminent in the legal profession, served in various public functions, and was the author of a work that became the standard text on Dutch jurisprudence. What will be discussed in this paper, however, is yet another achievement of his, the work that earned him the appellation father of international law. De jure belli acpacis libri tres (Three books on the law of war and peace), was published in 1625 in Paris, where he lived in political exile.1The work obviously met a need: a number of editions to which corrections and amendments of his were added had already been published in his lifetime, and subsequently there were even more. Jean Barbeyrac (1674-1744) recorded that it did not take long before an edition (Frankfurt a.d.O., 1691) cum commentants variorum, was published. This, he remarked, was an unusual honor: the authors of classical antiquity had to wait many centuries before their works were so edited. But then, as he writes, Jamais livre n'eut une approbation plus universelle.2 Barbeyrac, incidentally, deserves a brief introduction. He was a refugee from the persecution of Protestants in his native France and became a professor first in Lausanne and from 1717 in Groningen. He published an edition of Grotius's De jure and translated into French the major works on natural law by Grotius, Pufendorf, and Cumberland, which he supplied with wide-ranging prefatory discourses and copious annotations. He was the most frequent contributor to the monthly periodical Bibliotheque raisonnee?By the end of the seventeenth century, a new genre of writing emerged: histories of morality.4 This historiographical trend had its modest beginning with Samuel Pufendorf's (1632-94) short historical sketch on the origin and progress of the discipline of natural law.5 It presented Grotius as laying the foundation for this new discipline. Pufendorf saw himself as continuing what Grotius had begun. In the early eighteenth century, Barbeyrac and others, like Thomasius (1655-1728) and Buddeus (1667-1729) maintained that what Grotius had done was comparable to what Copernicus, Galileo, Bacon, and Descartes had done for natural philosophy.In the Prolegomena (i.e., the prefatory discourse) to his magnum opus, Grotius explained his main guiding principles, the sources and authorities he would rely on, and so on. His theory rests on ancient, especially Stoic and Christian traditions. They include the idea that there are binding norms of justice and morality, valid for all mankind equally. These higher norms ought to govern conduct even if they are not everywhere acknowledged or observed. They are valid even in the absence of an established authority able or willing to enforce them. That promises should be kept, that nobody should be harmed, that one should refrain from taking that which belongs to another, are among these norms.The very notion of international law, which Grotius wanted to promote, depends on the assumption that there are such higher norms of justice and morality. It is, he notes, an assumption that has been doubted or denied by many, who argue that such norms are illusory and that, even if they are valid, it would be sheer folly to heed them. At the outset it is therefore appropriate for him to show that they are mistaken, and this is what he undertakes in the early sections of the Prolegomena. Since those whose opinion he wants to refute are so many (turba, a crowd, a multitude)6 he appoints one advocate for them all, the ancient philosopher Carneades (216-129/8 BC)-the reason for this choice will be discussed farther on-who became scholarch of the Academy in Athens and was seen as a renewer of the sceptical tradition that Arcesilaus had founded. …

Mangope v. Van der Walt and Another NNO

6States — Existence — Absence of recognition — “State” established in violation of international law — Bantustans in South Africa — Establishment condemned by United Nations General Assembly — Bophuthatswana — Whether a State — Reintegration into South AfricaGovernments — Recognition — Criteria for regarding new regime as legitimate — Effective control — Acquiescence by population — Whether international law notions of de facto and de jure governments of any relevance — Overthrow of Bophuthatswana government and appointment of administrators by South African Government — Whether new regime meets criteria of effectiveness — The law of Bophuthatswana

Matanzima and Another v. President of the Republic of Transkei and Another

376Governments — Revolution — Overthrow of government in military coup d’état — Status of revolutionary regime — Authority of legislation adopted by revolutionary regime — Whether legitimate — Criteria for regarding revolutionary regime as legitimate — Effective control — Acquiescence by population — Whether international law notions of de facto and de jure governments of any relevance — Transkei — Overthrow of government by army — Whether revolutionary regime meets criteria of effectiveness — The law of Transkei

Термінологічні проблеми в українському законодавстві про міжнародний комерційний арбітраж

У статті розглянуто проблеми термінології в українському законодавстві про міжнародний комерційний арбітраж. Зокрема, проаналізовано значення таких термінів, як «арбітраж», «третейський суд» та «арбітражний суд», що застосовуються в Законі України «Про міжнародний комерційний арбітраж», та аналізується, як вони співвідносяться з англомовними термінами «arbitration», «arbitral tribunal» та «arbitral institution», що використовуються в Типовому Законі Юнсітрал про міжнародний комерційний арбітраж. У статті також визначено причини невідповідності значення даних українських термінів їх англомовним еквівалентам та запропоновано шляхи гармонізації термінології, що застосовується в Законі України «Про міжнародний комерційний арбітраж», з нормами міжнародного права.

The Soviet Interpretation of International Law

The five issues of Sovetskoe Gosudarstvo i Pravo which are here reviewed (Nos. 6, 7 and 8 of 1954, and Nos. 1 and 2 of 1955) contain a series of articles devoted to a discussion of the basic notions of international law. This discussion is related to the preparation of a new textbook for Soviet law schools the completion of which this year has been announced by the A. Ya. Vyshinsky Institute of Law, a branch of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.