This comment questions some of the key assumptions in the article by Roper and Barria with respect to the ICC's power to bargain with territorial states to attain the apprehension and surrender of indictees. The comment notes that, while factors such as the nature of the referral to the Court, the crimes charged, and whether the conflict is still ongoing are likely relevant to the ICC's bargaining power, the effect of these factors is indeterminate. The comment highlights the regional political dimension of the ICC's bargaining leverage in the Great Lakes region of Africa and suggests that the Court's bargaining power is engaged in a path-dependent three-level bargaining game.

How do we and how should we punish perpetrators of international crimes such as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide? Is it fair to hold individuals responsible for their role in manifestations of this type of collective violence? Do the punishments issued by international criminal institutions support the usual penological rationales? Do they actually attain their goals? Is the Westernized international criminal justice system the most appropriate means of dealing with mass violence, especially in non-Western countries which might have a different perception of justice? What are the alternatives? These are just some of the questions which Mark Drumbl addresses in this book.

The Telders International Law Moot Court Competition passed the milestone of its thirtieth birthday last year, and is still going strong. Since its humble beginnings in 1977, when only four universities took part, the Competition has today become the most prestigious and important moot court competition in Europe. Annually, teams from over forty universities compete in the national rounds, with the successful teams going on to represent their countries in the international rounds traditionally held at the Peace Palace in The Hague.

In a late interview given to the French newspaper Le Monde, Michel Foucault discussed his dreams for a different style of criticism. ‘I can't help but dream about a kind of criticism’, remarked Foucault, in which one would ‘not try to judge, but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life; it would light fires, watch the grass grow, listen to the wind, and catch the sea-foam in the breeze and scatter it.’ This somewhat wistful, poetic thought resonates with more familiar Foucauldian notions regarding the use of theory as a ‘toolkit’ or ‘toolbox’. Common to both these tropes – critique as affirmation and theory as functional – is the desire for thought to be put to work rather than put on trial, for sentences to be brought to life rather than delivered. And yet this presents the would-be Foucauldian book reviewer – and more so where the venue is the impeccably juridical one of the law journal – with a series of alluring problems. How might one elaborate such a Foucauldian critique in a context where one is expressly called upon to judge? What would such a non-judgmental Foucauldian critique look like? Are juridical practices of critique readily susceptible to Foucauldian appropriation or subversion? This set of related questions is emblematic of a wider concern of mine which forms the subject matter of this review essay, namely the place of Foucault (if indeed he has one) in legal theory. How does Foucault, that fabled figure of postmodern antinomianism who supposedly announced the demise and ‘expulsion’ of modern law, relate to legal theory? What might it mean to bring Foucault's unruly poststructuralism ‘into law’? And with what possible effects?

Recent political developments on the global scene have shed new light on established rules concerning the employment of military force while giving rise, among other things, to a reappraisal of the scope and limits of the right of self-defence. The terrorist attacks of September 2001 raised the question of whether actions by non-state actors can fall within the concept of ‘armed attack’. Those attacks were defined by UN Security Council Resolution 1368, under Article 39 of Chapter VII of the UN Charter, as ‘a threat to international peace and security’, but the ambiguous formulation left sufficient scope for upholding the prevailing view that Article 51 may only be invoked in the case of conflict between states. According to this view, which meanwhile has been contested, any resort to self-defence for legally justifying unilateral military action against terrorist organizations operating in other countries needs to be supported by evidence or argumentation that attacks perpetrated by those organizations can be attributed to a state. In defending the military campaign conducted to oust the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, the US government could credibly argue that this regime, exercising effective control over the country, was to be held accountable since it was harbouring members of al Qaeda on its territory and was actively supporting them.

On 30 May 2007 the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1757(2007), creating the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL) to try those responsible for the assassination of the former Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, which also claimed the life of twenty-two other persons. Following sensitive and unsuccessful discussions about the location of the seat of the tribunal, the government of the Netherlands informed the UN Secretary-General in September 2007 that it was favourably disposed to hosting the tribunal and, after three months of negotiations, signed, on 21 December 2007, in accordance with paragraph 1(b) of the resolution, a Headquarters Agreement enabling the seat of the STL to be in the Netherlands.

This case concerns a claim for damages suffered by nationals of the State of Icara following an aerial accident in the State of Mercuria.

Discussions on the creation of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon have focused on its impact on Lebanese sovereignty and, specifically, the fact that a Chapter VII resolution seems to bypass Lebanese democracy. Simply relying on the idea of a ‘breach of international peace and security’ to overcome these arguments is not helpful. It is more useful to locate the creation of the Tribunal within evolving international criminal justice practices. These practices are increasingly constraining the Security Council's own work rather than the contrary, as international criminal justice gradually emancipates itself from the confines of ‘international peace and security’ and becomes a logic unto itself.

A locus classicus of international law, the study of the regulation of the legality of the use of force has an unavoidable ring of tragic fanciness about it. War, as acknowledged by David Kennedy in the very first sentence of his book, is indeed ‘a profound topic – like truth, love, death or the divine’. A Pandora's box of multiple distilled intellectual emotions behind which lurk the horrid memories of its survivors, war only truly breathes in the mirrors of the mutilated, in the eyes of the tortured, in the memories of the displaced, in withering flowers over graves crowned, most of the time, by religious symbols. A vague intellectual scent of it, a sort of aseptic intellectual variant, still remains, nonetheless, a field of professional interest for international lawyers.

The cover of Sex Rights: The Oxford Amnesty Lectures 2002 shows a picture of two men photographed from the back, with their hands holding each other's waists. They are walking towards a camera crew. Based on the way they are dressed, it seems that they have just been married. Both men are wearing white dress shirts and have similar hairstyles, with one wearing a black waistcoat over the white shirt and the other with black braces. This collection, based on the Oxford Amnesty Lectures series on gender and sexuality, thus apparently features on its cover the same-sex marriage of two men, ostensibly held in one of the few jurisdictions that have legalized such a union (perhaps the Netherlands, which was the first to do so, and was later followed by Belgium, Spain, Canada, Massachusetts (United States), and South Africa). And while we know that ‘love and marriage go together like a horse and carriage’, what has sex got to do with this? Would it not be more appropriate for a cover of a book entitled Sex Rights to feature two persons engaged in sex or having just engaged in sex rather than a marriage ceremony? Would it not be more appropriate to depict, on a cover of a book called Sex Rights, a picture of two men in a position that suggests they have just had sex, an act for which they could be persecuted and prosecuted in various jurisdictions?

So why, then, does a book on Sex Rights feature same-sex marriage on its cover?

The Special Tribunal for Lebanon is the latest international criminal tribunal to be established by the United Nations. Similar in many respects to the earlier institutions – for the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone – it stands alone in the fact that its subject-matter jurisdiction does not contain any international crimes. It is thus international in some respects, but it is arguably not an international criminal tribunal in the sense that was intended by the International Court of Justice in the Yerodia case. The drafting history of the Statute of the Special Tribunal is examined with a view to determining whether the new court should treat sovereign immunity in the same manner as the other three UN criminal tribunals.

This article proceeds from two basic assumptions: that international criminal courts are engaged in writing history, and that this may influence the legal framework in which they operate. Against this background, the article takes a closer look at the Statute of the Special Tribunal for Lebanon in order to investigate allegations that the Tribunal has been tailor-made to further a certain view of recent Lebanese history.

A continuing debate within international law research is whether there is an emerging international constitutional order. This journal devoted an issue to this discussion and there have been a number of books and articles written on the subject. Indeed, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas has recently joined the debate by writing an essay entitled (in the English translation) ‘Does the Constitutionalization of International Law Still Have a Chance?’ The essay reminds the reader of constitutionalism's original philosophical roots in Kantian cosmopolitanism. Habermas argues that the world dominated by nation-states ‘is indeed in transition towards the postnational constellation of a global society’. He contrasts this vision with the realist opinion that the taming of political power through law is only possible within a sovereign state and with a more recent view postulating a vision of a liberal world order under the banner of Pax Americana. In support of the Habermas position, it can be argued that as a result of the UN 60th Anniversary Summit's adoption of the international norm of ‘the responsibility to protect’, there is a trend towards constitutional values in our international system. As Anne Peters states, ‘[t]he most fundamental norms might represent global constitutional law.’