This chapter focuses on international human rights. It covers the recognition and development of implementation and enforcement mechanisms in international human rights treaties, monitoring mechanisms, and regional human rights instruments.

This chapter highlights the varying nature of relationships which exist between international law and national (domestic) law. It covers direct effect, monism and dualism, monism and dualism in practice, rules of international law having direct or indirect effect, and national government bodies and international law.

This chapter is conceived as a first step in the identification of specific customary rules on cyber-espionage. In fact, the ILC made clear that ‘legislative acts’ and ‘executive conduct’ had to be considered as part of State practice in this context. It explores the national laws that exist in the field of espionage and cyber-espionage, and underlines that States usually prohibit espionage against their own interests, but authorise their own espionage activities abroad. It also analyses the grounds allowing intelligence collection, and notes that – more often than not – they are not limited to the protection of national security, but also include the economic well-being of a country. Then, a challenge to executive conduct – i.e., spying activities themselves – resides in the fact that they are usually performed in secret. It is however admitted that practice must be public (or at least known to the ‘victim State’), which means that clandestine examples of executive conduct cannot be taken into account in the assessment of customary international law. The admissible examples of State practice then exclusively reside in legislative acts, which were analysed in the previous chapter. This means that only the normative power of States – i.e., the possibility to adopt laws that authorise intelligence activities abroad, but prohibit espionage directed at their own interests – may count as State practice. In contrast, the clandestine implementation of these laws – which is materialised into executive conduct and espionage activities – is not admissible.

This chapter addresses immunities. To do so, it covers limitation of territorial jurisdiction, state immunity, derived immunities, and diplomatic immunities.

The book’s conclusion makes two primary contributions. It first reassesses the policy fiasco of the Industrial Relations Act to argue that, on both material and perceptual measures, it was a disaster that failed to achieve its aims and objectives. Specifically, the government failed to shape the perception of disengagement and was thus held directly responsible for the numerous debacles that followed. In a hyper-politicised context, the Act proved to be too blunt an instrument, incapable of responding to – and depoliticising – a complex and multi-faceted public policy challenge. The chapter builds on these insights to explore the legacy of the Act in relation to the Conservative Party’s approach to industrial relations reform and British trade unions generally. It traces the process of policy learning to detail the numerous step-by-step legislative interventions that followed in the 1980s. It argues that Conservative Party reformers successfully emasculated the trade unions and individualised employment relations. Industrial relations were largely shifted out of the political arena and no longer a site of societal deliberation and contestation. They were, in effect, depoliticised.

This chapter addresses peace and security. It covers the prohibition of (armed) force, exceptions to the prohibition on (armed) force, UN peace operations, international humanitarian law, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The focus of this chapter is state responsibility. The chapter introduces the concept of state responsibility and then covers international wrongful acts, circumstances precluding wrongfulness, cessation and compliance, and diplomatic protection.

The primary purpose of Chapter 5 is to chart the two most significant and infamous disputes during the Act’s life – the 1972 railways strikes and the docks disputes. The chapter highlights the fragility of ‘depoliticised’ governing as the Act proved incapable of defusing these highly politicised, national disputes. It argues that the role of the judiciary proved to be an inappropriate and deeply problematic vehicle for ‘depoliticised’ governing in this context as rank-and-file trade unionists distrusted the courts and began to actively resist and undermine the strategy. The government was neither insulated from blame as events unfolded, nor was it able to influence them from a distance. The ‘independence’ of the judiciary – the very thing it was hoped provided the strategy its credibility – became its liability as the framework of rules became increasingly unpredictable as creative judicial interpretation caused havoc and produced unanticipated outcomes. Through analysis of newly released archival material, the chapter explores how perceptions of governmental interference were forged as tensions grew between the overarching depoliticising intentions of the Act and the distinctly politicising interventionist emergency measures that these disputes involved.

The Hague Conventions II (1899) and IV (1907), as well as the Additional Protocol to Geneva Conventions (1977), are the only conventions where spying is expressly mentioned. In fact, they define what is a spy, and mention how spies may be captured and punished – but without prohibiting this activity itself. Several experts suggest, then, that the regime applicable to traditional espionage applied to cyber-espionage. This chapter argues that things are not that simple, and that wartime cyber-espionage between belligerents escapes regulations. In fact, these instruments were conceived to apply on land, and rely on these notions of ‘zone of operations’, ‘controlled territory’ or ‘occupied territory’. However, they do not make any sense in cyber-space, which is a fifth and different domain. States could have clarified whether and how these rules applied, but failed to do so. In fact, most States opted for the definition of minimal standards of protection – i.e., compliance with the principles of humanity, necessity, proportionality and discrimination – but ignored regulation of cyber-espionage.

This chapter argues that neither the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS) nor European Union law prohibits economic cyber-espionage. In fact, they still tolerate cyber-espionage on some specific grounds. On the one hand, Articles 3 (national treatment) and 39 (protection of undisclosed information) of the TRIPS do not prohibit it. This chapter argues that Article 3 and subsequent practice confirm that ‘national treatment’ only applies on the very territory of the Member State – i.e., it is not supposed to regulate the extraterritorial conduct of States – and is not intended to protect trade secrets. Then, pursuant to Article 39, States have a positive obligation: to give private persons the means to protect undisclosed information from ‘others’ – i.e., other private persons. However, States are not required to abstain from spying abroad. Furthermore, it argues that the ideals of an EU free market, loyal cooperation and a high level of competitiveness are not enough to prevent such activity either. The application of EU Directive 2016/943 does not give better results. On the other hand, under Article 73 of the TRIPS, Member States are free, ‘in time of war or other emergency in international relations’, to take any necessary measure for the protection of ‘essential security interests’. Yet, this power is more limited in peacetime. In fact, only information relating to ‘fissionable materials or the materials from which they are derived’, ‘traffic in arms ammunition and implements of war’ may be collected over this period. This means that, when essential security interests are at stake, certain forms of cyber-espionage are still conceivable.