Why do communist countries sign bilateral investment treaties (BITs)? This article explores this question through the case of Yugoslavia, the first communist state to do so. In 1974, Yugoslavia signed a BIT with France, paving the way for further investment treaties – both in Yugoslavia and, soon after, in other communist countries. These developments sparked intense debate within the Yugoslav Communist Party, with some factions viewing them as a betrayal of Marxist–Leninist principles. While Western powers welcomed the move, it was strongly criticized by Eastern Bloc countries, particularly the Soviet Union, as ideological heresy. This paper analyses the complex motivations behind Yugoslavia’s foreign investment policy in the 1960s and 1970s, arguing that it was driven by domestic political, geopolitical, and ideological factors – not just economic considerations. Domestically, BITs were linked to the Communist Party’s efforts to maintain political power and stability. Geopolitically, they served as tools to secure international allies. Ideologically, the policy sought to promote a distinct Yugoslav model of socialism – one that blended socialist principles, workers’ self-management, market economics, and coexistence with both capitalist and socialist states. This ideological dimension, overlooked in the literature, highlights how BITs were not merely economic instruments but also tools for advancing a hybrid economic and foreign policy that challenged both capitalist and Soviet orthodoxies.

In considering the charges brought against Al Hassan Ag Abdoul Aziz Ag Mohamed Ag Mahmoud, the ICC has been forced to address the question of Islamic criminal law. Following the reasoning of the Prosecution, Trial Chamber X considered Sharia punishments mandated by the Islamic court and implemented by the Islamic police to be evidence of the existence of an organizational policy to commit a widespread or systematic attack against a civilian population with the aim of denigrating and subjugating the community in Timbuktu. Trial Chamber X also accepted the Prosecution’s conclusion that applying different forms of Sharia punishments amounted to the crime of torture. Such an expansive view of core international crimes has the potential to send an alienating message to Muslim communities around the world and particularly those countries that apply Sharia criminal law. The overriding narrative of the article does not diminish the harm caused by Ansar Eddine but rather presents an alternative to the Trial Chamber’s and the Prosecution’s reasoning, campaigning for more active engagement with the principles of Sharia. As discussed at length, the duty of an international court is to adapt a multicultural and diverse interpretative guidelines by considering more traditional systems of justice. In that regard, the ICC has yielded to the universalists and Eurocentric agenda by deciding to dismiss Islamic traditions in their entirety. While Sharia based punishments remain shocking for the Western societies, their spiritual, religious, and exonerating value remains poignant for the Muslim majority states and communities. The practices cannot be therefore dismissed, and if looked at in line with the Third World Approaches to International Law could enrich the legal reasoning for future investigations and trials.

Transitional justice has become the legal and moral grammar for articulating victims’ demands for justice in conflict-affected societies. Yet it is a grammar that deftly places the responsibility for addressing impoverished victims’ main concerns, namely economic and social rights (ESR), in other fields. This is largely possible thanks to the ‘separability thesis’, according to which ESR and reparations are conceptually distinct, and therefore the guarantee of ESR cannot be considered a means of reparation. This thesis, now widely accepted by scholars, UN special procedures, and the Inter-American Human Rights System, places victims in a situation where they can be repaired while remaining poor. This article critically examines the development of this thesis during the encounter with transitional justice in Colombia and clarifies the important role it has played in the remaking of the field and its application in conflict-affected societies. Drawing on the lessons of this conceptual history, the article argues for the development of a framework that articulates victims’ everyday ESR claims in terms of reparation, and explores human rights bodies, traditionally neglected in the transitional justice literature, that are well suited for this purpose. Reconsidering the separability thesis requires rethinking the state–individual relationship, understanding state power not only as a source of mistrust and a target of stigmatization, but also as an active agent in addressing socioeconomic wrongs. With this shift, the article anchors the literature on transformative reparations within the normative framework of the ICESCR, while acknowledging the realpolitik constraints that affect the guarantee of ESR.

Transnational climate litigation has become a strategic tool to press state and non-state actors into action. An analysis of international and domestic cases shows how rights and obligations are being materially, subjectively, spatially and temporally stretched in judicial proceedings. This article focuses on three distinct grammars of climate justice activated in climate litigation. The analysis exposes a shift from a traditional to a progressive grammar that moves from actual to potential climate harms, from human to nonhuman rights, from territorial to extra-territorial obligations, and from present to future generations. Beyond a traditional liberal framing of rights-based approaches to climate justice, we witness here a progressive critical grammar that broadens the scope of who can be considered legally affected by climate change, where, and how. A more radical understanding of climate justice, however, exceeds the capacity of these registers to confer structure, order, and meaning to climate harms across matter, subjects, space and time. Against this backdrop, a reparative grammar of climate justice is envisioned, which reconfigures the material boundary from potential to entangled harms, the subjective boundary from nonhuman victims to more-than-human care, the spatial boundary from extra-territorial to terrestrial spatiality, and the temporal boundary from future to enduring temporalities. In doing so, the analysis opens up a register of political thought for climate justice that starts in the law yet vastly exceeds and disrupts it.

The incorporation of victim participation into the legal framework of the International Criminal Court (ICC) brought hope, to some, that the voices of victims would be elevated and heard more clearly in the ICC’s proceedings than they had been at previous international criminal tribunals, where they could participate only as witnesses. While research has emphasized the significant distinction to be drawn between the wide pool of victims of international crime and the far more restricted pool of ‘juridified victims’ who participate in international criminal proceedings, less attention has been drawn to the demographics of the juridified victim and the extent to which victim participation is shaped by factors such as age, gender, and disability. This article presents the results of a survey of practitioners and analysis of court documents which indicate that there are a wide range of barriers to the participation of certain groups of victims, which can result in their under-representation. It proposes measures that can be taken to foster a more inclusive victim participation scheme and calls for more rigorous monitoring and reporting on the demographics of victims that participate in ICC proceedings. It also sets out a case for greater inclusion rooted in the rights of victims, the requirements of the Court’s legal framework, the goals of the ICC and the promotion of victim agency and voice.

This study examines how contested statehood is navigated in the ambit of the common participation in a multilateral treaty, focusing on a bilateral legal relationship between a non-recognizing state and an entity with disputed statehood. Using the case of Serbia and Kosovo, the research explores how a state that does not recognize another entity strategically navigates their shared participation in multilateral agreements. It analyses legal tools available to non-recognizing states to safeguard their national interests, including statements of non-recognition, objections to accession, engagement with treaty depositaries, and territorial clauses. The findings demonstrate that statements of exclusion are the most legally effective instrument for preventing the establishment of bilateral treaty relations while other mechanisms primarily serve the communicative function. The study highlights the dual role of international law, as both a legal framework governing treaties and a strategic tool for states to manage contested sovereignty within multilateral treaties.

Tragically, the abuse of children within organizational contexts continues to persist across time and geographies. Various institutions established for children’s care and protection have repeatedly been exposed as epicentres of abuse. The concept and practice of ‘child safeguarding’ has emerged as an approach to address the systemic failures within organizational settings that enable – or fail to prevent – child abuse. Child safeguarding has received minimal academic attention and there is a notable lack of focus on the legal dimensions of child safeguarding, especially from an international human rights law perspective. This article contends that child safeguarding should shift from being viewed primarily as a practice issue to being understood and approached as a matter of children’s rights law. The article connects the concept and practice of child safeguarding with international children’s rights law norms and standards, examines the role of the state vis-à-vis non-state actors, and brings together the various guidance of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child articulating the responsibilities of states in protecting children from violence perpetrated by non-state actors, including a case example of the Committee’s inquiry into Chile’s residential care centres. The article suggests a baseline of child safeguarding responsibilities for NGOs working with children and calls for greater attention to child safeguarding within international children’s rights discourse.

This paper contests the neglect of the non-solidarity of the new Latin American republics as a causal factor in the international isolation of Haiti during the early nineteenth century, and the consequent imposition of European neocolonialism in the region. Moreover, in doing so, the paper also unearths the historically ambiguous relationships of non-intervention and regionalist internationalism to empire in Latin America. Whereas these two principles have since been recognized by scholars as key, anti-imperialist features of Latin American international law, this paper argues that, in the context of Colombian–Haitian (dis)engagement during the mid-1820s, they were used to legitimize the refusal of anticolonial solidarity to Haiti when it was needed most, thereby enabling French and wider European imperialism.

There is a consensus in international lawyers’ analyses on jurisdiction, that jurisdiction doctrine is unworkable. Extraterritorial jurisdiction is no longer exceptional; at the same time, it is almost impossible to distinguish between territorial and extraterritorial jurisdiction. Legal experts have had three reactions to this crisis of extra/territorial jurisdiction. Some of them continue to pretend that nothing is wrong, and territorial jurisdiction is well and alive: this can be called ‘zombie territoriality’. Others acquiesce to the end of territoriality by affirming a type of limitless jurisdiction based on ‘genuine connections’, ‘substantial links’, or the like. Thirdly, some lawyers have set different limits for different sub-domains of international law, thereby fragmenting the law of jurisdiction and creating different meanings of ‘territoriality’ for international criminal law, international financial law, antitrust law, human rights law, etc. In this explosion of jurisdictional sub-domains, territoriality is strict in human rights law and refugee law, but remarkably flexible in criminal law and antitrust law. Is there any way out of this crisis of jurisdiction? Limitless jurisdiction seems to be winning out, but some scholars have tried to reformulate non-intervention or self-determination as substantive bulwarks against extraterritoriality. Developing multilateral institutions would also prevent jurisdictional overreach. In truth, though, all the proposed ways out of the crisis of jurisdiction mean the end of jurisdiction doctrine. It may be time to accept that we now live in a post-jurisdictional system of international law.