The privatization of rights and obligations of states under the influence of international organizations (IOs) is a challenge for international law. The difficulty resides in the lack of a clear public status of those organizations. This article purports to identify an ‘international public law’ of both states and IOs. Only such a law could indeed institute international organizations as ‘public’ institutions of their member states’ peoples and thereby ‘reinstitute’ those peoples. The article’s first section presents an institutional-normative account of publicness. A second section presents how, even though an international law ‘of the public’ gradually developed after the nineteenth century, that public dimension was never very strong, not the least because of the role played by IOs. The third section explains indeed how, due to IOs’ construction as functional and apolitical organizations and the private law analogies that have dominated their organization, the international law of IOs quickly turned into a vector of public/private hybridization of both states and IOs. To address this challenge, the fourth section argues not only for a general and minimal common public status of IOs under international law, but also against quick analogies with states’ sovereign rights and obligations. To help consolidate the proposed distinct albeit continuous public status of IOs, the fifth section spells out what could be the common but differentiated public rights of states and IOs which may not be conferred to private persons, and their common but differentiated public obligations that could set limits on the private exercise of these rights.

The relationship between time and international law is intricate and multifaceted, long evading methodical analysis. However, recent years have seen a surge in scholarly efforts to address this relationship. Taking a broad view of this burgeoning literature, this article recounts the temporal assumptions, narratives, and dynamics at play in the international legal sphere, while highlighting their logics and limitations. In doing so, it develops a critical typology of international law’s temporalities, distinguishing between three overarching paradigms: modern, postmodern, and hypermodern. The modern temporal paradigm, commonly seen as dominating the discipline, views international law as progressing uniformly and linearly from a dark past toward a brighter present and future. In contrast, the postmodern paradigm challenges the modern narrative of universal progress over time, shifting the focus to the past and the ways in which international law allows past wrongs to reverberate into the present. While each of these paradigms serves important functions, the article argues that neither provides a sufficient framework for navigating international law in the current era of accelerated technological, social, and environmental change, where the future increasingly diverges from the known past and present. The article thus calls for greater incorporation into the discipline of a third, hypermodern temporal paradigm, which takes a sober look at the future and recalibrates international law’s temporal modalities in response to rapidly evolving and increasingly complex global challenges.

From the World Bank’s ‘Climate-Smart Mining’ initiative or ‘Resilient and Inclusive Supply-Chain Enhancement’ program to the IMF’s ‘Energy Transition Strategies’, international development institutions have plenty to say about the role of the supply chain in securing critical minerals for green energy technologies.1 This article forms part of a bigger project that examines how the form of the supply chain, in the context of the contemporary energy transition, entrenches the patterns of distribution and accumulation that we often associate with the fossil fuel economy. In this way, I argue that the supply chain contributes to suppressing alternative legal forms of decarbonization.2 Multiple international legal practices and modes of thought are involved in this suppression. In this article, I offer an account of how logistics, as a practice, discipline of supply chain management, and form of governance or jurisdiction contribute to foreclosing possibilities for alternative forms of decarbonization in ways that both implicate international law and point to possibilities for contestation.

Marine genetic resources (MGRs) sit at the centre of emerging biotechnological innovation, yet the international legal regimes governing their access, use, and benefit-sharing remain fragmented and often contradictory. This article operationalizes Hohfeld’s relational framework to map the legal relations embedded in six core instruments that regulate MGRs: the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD), the Nagoya Protocol, the WIPO Treaty on Genetic Resources and Associated Traditional Knowledge (GRATK), and the Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement. The resulting Hohfeldian mapping shows how claim-rights, obligations, powers, and other legal positions are distributed across these regimes, revealing overlapping and sometimes competing legal logics within MGR governance. This approach clarifies the relational structure of these legal positions and highlights how legal form shapes, and occasionally obscures, the exercise of authority, the creation of regulatory gaps, and the persistence of asymmetries, particularly in relation to benefit-sharing and the treatment of digital sequence information. The analysis draws on a manually curated, machine-readable dataset that serves as a resource for further research. The article places the legal governance of MGRs within wider debates on the international law of global commons and sets out a methodological scaffold for comparative and critical legal analysis. It ultimately invites a reconsideration of who owns and who owes what within the evolving governance of MGRs.

The international community is not on track to achieve the Paris Agreement’s objectives. Global temperatures have already risen by more than 1.3°C, and greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year after year. Nevertheless, the IPCC asserts that staying within the safe threshold remains achievable. Against this backdrop, and in light of the recent ICJ Advisory Opinion on the Obligation of States in respect of Climate Change, this paper examines the content and legal nature of the Paris Agreement’s long-term temperature goal. First, it analyses whether the legal threshold should be set at 1.5°C or 2°C. Second, by interpreting the Paris Agreement within the framework of international law, it identifies this temperature objective as the treaty’s object and purpose. Consequently, Article 2(1)(a) assumes a critical interpretive role. Moreover, drawing inspiration from Articles 18 and 26 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, this article upholds that states have an obligation to refrain from acts that would defeat this collective goal. Contrary to traditional perspectives, this article argues that this obligation applies both before and after the treaty’s entry into force. This commitment is characterized as an integral obligation of due diligence.

Academic and judicial discussions about the preparatory works of treaties are usually focused on the definition of travaux and the circumstances in which such materials may be relied upon to interpret an international agreement. By contrast, little has been said about how the travaux themselves should be interpreted. This article attempts to fill this gap, through an analysis of international case law and scholarship from which a list of seven relevant factors to elucidate travaux can be drawn.

This article examines the EU’s Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive (Directive) and its proposed amendment, especially from a Third World view. It establishes that, practically, the Directive has a limited value for Africans because it cannot stop corporate human rights abuses and economic exploitation in Africa. In contrast, the Directive entrenches neocolonial norms in the Business and Human Rights (BHR) field. This article also argues that it is futile for Third World Peoples to look to international law, given its capitalist history and the growing EU dominance in the BHR treaty discussions. Instead of looking to Europe or international law to save Africans from corporate abuses and economic exploitation, African states must look inward to create subsidiary norms that challenge and resist neocolonialism in the BHR field. To achieve this, it discusses the normative agency of the African Union in leading an Africanization agenda.

This article examines three key cases decided by the CERD Committee to show how the semantic conundrum of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD) becomes an obstacle in extending protection against racial discrimination to various racialized groups. It is argued that the wording of Article 1 of ICERD creates a tripartite classification of semantics, in which meaning generated through different protected grounds obscures the conception of racial discrimination. This places constraints on the Committee’s ability to decide in favour of racialized non-citizens. The article proceeds to examine the jurisprudence of direct, indirect, and positive discrimination in the context of Article 1. It contends that while the semantic conundrum of ICERD confines racial discrimination to limited grounds, using the forms of discrimination can yield positive results. This is shown by re-examining the three cases, this time using the lens of forms of discrimination. It is argued that this approach can enable the Committee to transcend the semantic conundrum of ICERD and arrive at more nuanced conclusions.

The use of amnesties in transitional justice remains a contentious issue. The fight against impunity at the international level has left little room for the application of amnesties for international crimes and human rights abuses. Nevertheless, amnesty measures continue to be applied in many jurisdictions and the permissibility of conditional amnesties enacted as part of wider processes of reconciliation remains under debate. This paper argues that the judicial discussion of amnesties under international law has followed dynamics of path dependence, where initial decisions adopted in very specific contexts have strongly determined the subsequent treatment of amnesties in completely different situations. The influence of early decisions rejecting blanket amnesties in the aftermath of autocratic regimes in Latin America pulled domestic and international courts towards a general rejection of amnesties. However, in more recent years, transitional justice ideas have influenced the trajectory of the discussion on amnesties, opening courts to the permissibility of conditional and negotiated amnesties accompanied by alternative mechanisms of accountability. Mapping the judicial dialogue on amnesties, this paper shows a cautious shift in the approach to conditional amnesties. This is significant because international courts have mostly engaged with the most problematic amnesties, leaving some uncertainty around the way conditional amnesties enacted as part of complex transitional frameworks will be evaluated. Reading a significant number of decisions from different jurisdictions, this essay aims to shed some light on the way domestic courts have addressed the discussion of amnesties when they are part of wider efforts to bring peace, reconciliation, and democracy.

In their submissions to the International Court of Justice in the context of the Policies and Practices of Israel Advisory Opinion, states assessed the legality of Israel’s prolonged occupation using various legal frameworks, including international humanitarian law. In doing so, some participants in the proceedings appear to have endorsed a doctrinal position suggesting that an occupation may become unlawful under international humanitarian law due to its prolonged character. This article demonstrates that such an interpretation of the law of occupation lacks consensus and does not fully align with the law as it currently stands. Building on this observation, and based on the language deployed by states in their most recent submissions, this article suggests an alternative argument: the protracted character of Israel’s occupation is more accurately framed as an abuse of the law of occupation, rather than a violation of this regime.

Children associated with armed forces or armed groups (‘child soldiers’) experience conflict in highly differentiated ways, including in their exposure to gender-based violence. Cognisant of that reality, this article seeks to enrich current understandings of gender-based violence against female child soldiers by focussing on one relatively under-examined type: reproductive violence against female child soldiers. It revisits relevant cases from three jurisdictions which have most engaged with female child soldiers: the International Criminal Court, Special Court for Sierra Leone, and Colombian national courts. In each jurisdiction, the author closely examined publicly available court records, in order to detect references to (mostly uncharged) acts of reproductive violence against girls in armed groups. Forms of reproductive violence against child soldiers identified through this method include forcible impregnation and/or forced pregnancy, forced maternity, forced contraception and forced abortion, being forced to bear children before being sufficiently developed themselves, and the denial of reproductive health care. The article then explores how such reproductive violence might be charged as war crimes and crimes against humanity in future cases. This lens on child soldiers is especially timely, given the recent ‘reproductive violence’ turn in the field of international criminal law.