Elections in Central Asia unfold against a backdrop of digital repression, characterized by network throttling, online content blocking to suppress dissent and targeted online harassment of political opposition and journalists. State-imposed limits on online information availability are compounded by cyber foreign interference, including espionage, information campaigns, and disruptive incidents that have increasingly played a geopolitical role. These multifaceted cyber threats underscore the urgent need for a rapid, concerted policy response aimed at bolstering the integrity of electoral systems and procedures, reducing censorship and enhancing cybersecurity culture and resilience. This chapter explores trends in influencing elections and threatening electoral integrity through cyber means, focusing on both the informational and technical domains, and proposes action-oriented recommendations for cross-sectoral cooperation toward securing elections and the broader digital ecosystem in the region.

Abstract: This chapter explores the procedural and substantive dimensions of compliance disputes before international courts (ICs), focusing on jurisdiction, admissibility, and available remedies. It considers consent to adjudication at the compliance stage and examines the legal bases for ICs to address claims of non-compliance with previous judgments. The chapter analyses objections to admissibility, including challenges based on res judicata, the absence of a meaningful dispute, and the lack of concrete legal effects, then discusses how ICs navigate these objections, employing procedural techniques and remedy escalation to address persistent non-compliance. This inquiry demonstrates the dual role of compliance adjudication: deterring breaches through authoritative declarations and enabling new remedies where prior rulings fail to lead to compliance. These mechanisms underscore the potential of compliance adjudication to enhance the enforceability of international obligations despite ICs’ inability to order the deployment of coercion against recalcitrant states.

The Introduction provides an overview of trademark laws that implicate the right to freedom of expression. It also introduces the concept of inherently valuable expression in trademark law. Examples include descriptive trademarks; popular phrases and designs claimed as marks for T-shirts and other types of expressive merchandise; political and social messages; words, names, and symbols important to religious or indigenous communities; popular colors and shapes; and culturally significant creative works claimed as trademarks. The introduction also discusses the proposed free speech framework for trademark law. Government decision-makers should (1) identify the purpose of this specific trademark law and determine whether it is sufficiently important; (2) evaluate whether that particular trademark law directly and materially furthers its purpose; and (3) determine whether this trademark law endangers free speech, and ensure that it suppresses or chills protected expression no more than necessary in pursuit of that important purpose. The introduction concludes with an overview of trademark registration and enforcement laws that may potentially conflict with the free expression right.

This contribution retells the familiar story of the international tax regime from an unconventional perspective, revealing how racial fears have burdened communities around the globe. It explores the impact of anti-Black racism on the international tax regime, tracing the evolution of international tax rules that have impoverished vulnerable states and eviscerated social safety nets in wealthier ones. Decolonisation granted political power and economic autonomy to erstwhile possessions only to watch it be stripped away by treaties designed to constrain fiscal sovereignty.

Globally, there exists no legitimate international tax policy-making institution. This has perpetually led to inequalities and deepening economic disparities in the current international tax governance system. This chapter argues that African countries should use the spirit of cooperation that the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) encapsulates to make difficult decisions about African tax governance. Since international tax governance is at a critical stage where it is uncertain that the status quo can continue, it is important for African countries to seize this opportunity to create a regional governance structure that could bring more fairness and justice to the international tax system as a whole. This chapter proposes that African countries through the African Union form their own international tax governance structure which would bring together existing regional economic communities (RECs) and the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) to create an international tax forum that would address specifically African concerns. Moreover, such a structure would give African countries the critical mass needed to rebalance the unequal power relations in international tax while also offering benefits to the African people.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated the rise of illiberal democracy and authoritarianism globally, granting governments unchecked power. In contrast, Asian jurisdictions like Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore have resisted this trend. This chapter investigates the respective constitutional foundations, jurisprudential developments, and democratic processes in Taiwan, South Korea, and Singapore that enabled the varying degrees of resistance against the rise of illiberal and authoritarian governance during the pandemic. For example, in Taiwan and South Korea, democratic competition continued unabated during the pandemic, and rights assertions by affected individuals and human rights groups became stronger. In Singapore, albeit usually seen as an authoritarian constitutional polity, the government proactively sought community engagement and social support for undertaking pandemic measures, which were surprisingly less restrictive and more transparent. Moreover, nongovernmental organizations and courts provided counterbalancing forces, ensuring accountability, civic participation, and due process. These experiences show that tensions between the rule of law, human rights, and crises such as COVID-19 can still be mitigated democratically.

A framing case study examines North Korea’s nuclear tests. Then the chapter examines how states make international law. The chapter specifically discusses: (1) treaties, including entry into treaties, reservations, interpretation, and exit; (2) customary international law, including state practice, acceptance as law (opinio juris), and conceptual challenges; and (3) other important factors, including general principles, unilateral declarations, and peremptory norms (jus cogens).

The mobility of individuals raises a host of tax and non-tax issues. This chapter explains an underappreciated phenomenon: how the corporate income-allocation rules have developed in recent years in a way that magnifies the impacts of human mobility on the corporate income tax system. For example, activities of a relocated or remote employee might trigger the permanent-establishment threshold, thereby creating a taxable presence for the relevant employing company (and/or other group companies) in the state of relocation. In that event, additional questions would arise about the level of the reward to be assigned to those activities for the purposes of the transfer-pricing and/or profit-attribution rules. This chapter demonstrates how recent controversies about the interpretation of the income-allocation rules in the light of the BEPS changes to the arm’s-length principle and the taxable threshold rules are likely to further fuel corporate income tax difficulties from mobility, and in some cases create entirely novel problems. A prognosis of the likely future outturn relating to these issues concludes the discussion.

Rising to speak in the House of Commons in November 1947, Winston Churchill – by then no longer prime minister but still member of parliament, his party having been defeated in the general election of May 1945 – remarked that “No one pretends that democracy is perfect … Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried.” Churchill felt especially convinced that it was superior to those varieties of governance that relied upon “a group of super men and super-planners … ‘playing angel’ … and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction.” The following year, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was signed. While the term democracy is not mentioned, its essence is enshrined in the document, signed by democracies and autocracies alike: “The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.”

This chapter focuses on a relatively unknown Jewish/German jurist, Dr Walter Schwarz. Schwarz returned to Berlin in the 1950s and practiced as a restitution lawyer. He was one of only a few Jewish lawyers working in Berlin at this time. Schwarz set up a legal journal, where he also published ‘glosses’ under pseudonyms. Found in a library in Berlin, I translate and analyse a selection of these glosses written by Schwarz. Going beyond the legal representation he could offer to his clients, I contend the writing of the glosses is a different method for Schwarz to take responsibility for the conduct of the restitution program. This chapter sets up the way giving an account of restitution can be an ethos – of writing, but also of conduct, of practice.

Before examining how the regulation of bioethical matters impacts the equal right to live in the world for people with impairments, Chapter 1 elaborates on key concepts relevant for the book’s later chapters: disability, eugenics, ableism, and neoliberalism. It begins with a critical discussion of the medical and social models of disability, the two dominant approaches to understanding disability in disability studies. The chapter also highlights the troubled recent history of eugenics, the concept of ableism and the persistence of ableist policies and practices, as well as the importance and shortcomings of disability rights laws in furthering disability justice and equality.