The article analyses archival materials from the drafting of the UN Marriage Convention (1962) between 1949 and 1962. This Convention is usually understood as a human- and women’s rights Convention. The article expands this understanding by showing that the Convention was produced through a collaboration between the UN Commission on the Status of Women, and the Trusteeship Council, Committee on Information from Non-Self-Governing Territories, and metropolitan administrators of former colonies, then having the status of dependent territories. The treaty-makers focused exclusively on marriages in the dependencies but were in great doubt about the form and amount of force in these marriages. They, accordingly, were unsure how to measure such force. Nevertheless, they proceeded with the drafting, as their visions of free marriage and emancipated women were bolstered by their commitment to the ongoing economic transformation accompanying decolonization of the territories. The article shows how human rights of marriage thus emerged from ideas about economic development convoluted with ideas about marriages and women; and articulates this history’s theoretical implications for the rights’ applicability today. It also expands our understanding of international women’s rights as regulatory models, and of the post-colonial political economy of international law.

Since 1996, international human rights law (IHRL) has attempted to address caste-based discrimination through the rubric of racial discrimination by reading caste into ‘descent’ under Article 1(1) of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (ICERD). However, this framing of discrimination remains inadequate. The Committee on Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the UN Sub-Commission for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights sought to identify caste-based discrimination by identifying practices of untouchability without analysing caste as a system of entitlement to knowledge, wealth, and land. Therefore, IHRL envisioned caste-based discrimination as primarily inflicting recognition harms on its victims. This meant that even material manifestations of caste-based discrimination were framed as consequences of untouchability. Furthermore, the creative legal move to read caste into ‘descent’ meant deracinating caste from its particular context in South Asia — where it remains imbricated with Brahmanical Hinduism1 — into a general form of ‘descent’ like any other ascriptive category. This process of abstraction erases the interdigitation of caste and Hinduism. These two moves mean IHRL remains ill-equipped to identify, let alone redress, caste-based discrimination.

This article presents a critical postcolonial analysis of international human rights law’s engagement with human trafficking through the lens of seven UN treaty bodies. Drawing on content analysis of 1,197 documents (33 General Comments/Recommendations, 1,049 Concluding Observations, and 115 Individual Communications), the article reveals how international human rights law is implicated in the status subordination of subaltern people. The article identifies 54 documents containing evidence of colonial legacies, with 76% of relevant Concluding Observations addressing Global South states. It argues that treaty bodies reinscribe colonial patterns through problematic conflation of trafficking with slavery, promotion of repressive migration policies, inconsistent treatment of prostitution and sex tourism, perpetuation of ‘raid and rescue’ approaches, and essentialization of trafficking victims as ‘innocent’. It also exposes limited engagement with intersectionality in individual communications, potentially overlooking complex, multifaceted experiences of trafficking victims. The article concludes by proposing concrete strategies to decolonise anti-trafficking law and practice, including interrogating assumed neutrality in legal instruments, embracing a politics of recognition, integrating the concept of ‘burdened agency’, and meaningfully countenancing intersectionality in legal analyses. This analysis contributes to understanding how international human rights law can better serve its emancipatory potential while avoiding the perpetuation of status subordination.

In 1919, the League of Nations and the Mandate System were established through the Treaty of Versailles. Shy of 100 years later, the International Rights of Nature Tribunal gathered in the same city to establish itself as an international peoples’ tribunal, taking form outside the international legal order. For all their differences, these institutions shared some commonalities. Both institutions claimed to be concerned with the ‘wellbeing’ of ‘peoples’ through international law. Both also claimed to represent some kind of international legal community. For the League, this was a community of states. For the Tribunal, it was a community of peoples. This article reads these institutional moments together and considers what they tell us about the discipline of international law. It traces how both institutions constituted and authorized themselves as if speaking for an already given international legal community – and how they did so precisely by mobilizing competing ideas of ‘nature’, ‘peoples’, and ‘statehood’. The article argues that the institutions deployed similar legal techniques and narratives that limited what the international legal domain might, and might not, look like. Namely, they presented their ideas of ‘nature’ and ‘peoples’ as part of a natural order of things, authorizing themselves as vanguards for whatever form of international legal order they saw as ‘natural’. Ultimately, the piece complicates our understanding of the international legal domain and peoples’ tribunal in it, inviting a reflexivity over what it means to speak law in the name of an international community – be it as ‘states’, ‘peoples’ or ‘nature’ itself.

Following the announcement of lunar programs by the US and China in recent years, a new round of lunar competition has commenced. In the absence of effective international regimes, there is a pressing need to develop legal measures to preserve lunar security and safety. Rules on demilitarization and deconfliction are particularly crucial. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty establishes the principles of ‘peaceful purposes’ and ‘exclusively for peaceful purposes’, but their interpretation remains contested. The rise of cislunar space strategies further complicates the application of these principles. Meanwhile, for managing daily operations on the lunar surface, the US-led Artemis Accords propose safety zones to prevent harmful interference. However, non-signatories like China and Russia are not bound by these provisions. As a significant player in the lunar competition, China should contribute to the establishment and improvement of legal measures to ensure lunar security and safety. For lunar demilitarization, China should refine the PPWT draft to address the specific security demands of cislunar space and the Moon. Concurrently, China should actively participate in formulating norms, rules, and principles of responsible behavior to mitigate threats in cislunar space and on the Moon until a universally accepted legally binding treaty is achieved. For lunar deconfliction, considering that the creation of safety zones may become the earliest practice to fulfill the obligation to avoid harmful interference, China needs to coordinate with the US to negotiate detailed rules on the size, scope, nature, behavior, and dispute settlement measures related to safety zones.

Article 2(4) of the UN Charter prohibits the use of force in international relations and separately bans any threat of force, whether explicit or implicit. However, what constitutes an implicit threat remains ill-defined, undermining the UN Charter’s system of collective security. This article addresses the central question: How can implicit threats be more reliably identified? It begins by reviewing the incomplete work of the International Law Commission on threats of force, then develops a framework to distinguish prohibited implicit threats from permissible state behaviour. Grounded in a theoretical understanding of threats of force as forms of communication rather than action, the article offers a clear definition of implicit threats. To exemplify this definition, it adapts the approach of the Definition of Aggression resolution, enabling a more precise attribution of prima facie responsibility for implicit threats. Subsequently, the article explores possible justifications for implicit threats, identifies their legal consequences and outlines modalities for international responses to such threats. Finally, the article suggests resuming the juridical effort to progressively develop international law in this area.

The aim of this empirical study is to map the representation before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) from 1997 to 2023, with a specific emphasis on oral proceedings. The dataset consists of background information on the identity of those appearing before ITLOS. To achieve this, various characteristics were coded, including the professional background, the gender, the nationality and the development status of the country of nationality. The study explores common assumptions, such as whether the oral proceedings are male dominated. It also investigates more specific hypotheses related to ITLOS as a specialized tribunal and whether this specialization results in any particularity in terms of representation.

Policies on the demand side of fossil fuels are not enough to fight against climate change, and policies on the supply side should be adopted as supplements. The idea of phasing out fossil fuels at the starting point of the energy chain, despite the fact that it has not yet been legally binding, has been seriously discussed in the Conference of the Parties. In this regard, the special situation of highly fossil fuel-dependent countries (HFFDCs), such as Iraq and Azerbaijan, should be fully considered under Article 4.8 of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. This article seeks to analyse the legal approach and arguments of the HFFDCs and the non-fossil fuel-dependent countries (NFFDCs), such as Austria and Sweden, towards policies and initiatives to phase out fossil fuels. The NFFDCs, relying on the just transition stemming from principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities and Respective Capabilities, have put forward the initiatives of creating a non-binding coalition and a binding treaty in analogy with the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons. In contrast, the HFFDCs, based on the principle of permanent sovereignty over natural resources, have presented the Net Avoided Emission and phasing out fossil fuel emissions initiatives. Each party has a fundamental criticism of the legal arguments and the initiative of the other party. The idea of the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2018 to promote the human right to equitable development can reconcile the parties’ arguments. This idea requires the NFFDCs to cooperate with the HFFDCs in improving the level of human development and reducing the economic and social effects rising from phasing out fossil fuels in the HFFDCs.

Who is particularly vulnerable to climate change, how do these vulnerabilities intersect, and what do they mean for climate litigation? For the European Convention on Human Rights, these questions have not yet been conclusively answered. Although recent climate rulings recognized the interdependence of human rights and climate change, the European Court of Human Rights has proven reluctant to engage with the fundamental inequity of climate change and the intersecting vulnerabilities that shape how groups and individuals experience its effects. The present article argues that the Court’s staunch refusal to think intersectionally led to its current, untenably high bar for individual victim status in climate cases. It engages critically with this refusal, arguing that the difficulty of issuing model judgments to face large-scale structural problems like climate change should not come at the cost of engaging with the intersecting vulnerabilities and inequalities at the core of such a case. In doing so, it invites a rethinking of vulnerability in the Court’s parlance.

International criminal law constitutes the culmination of the ‘anti-impunity agenda’ within international law, policy, and practice. This agenda, often advanced under the rallying cry of ‘never again’ – a pledge to never let atrocities like those of the Second World War happen again to anyone – is driven by the conviction that criminal sanctions are essential for fulfilling this promise and conveying collective condemnation of such horrors. This results in what we term the ‘penal accountability paradigm’ in relation to atrocities: positioning punishment at the forefront of the prevention of, and justice and accountability for, atrocities. This paper examines some of the damaging implications of this paradigm within and beyond international criminal law, particularly its distorting effects on responses to ongoing atrocities in Palestine. We suggest that, in the context of these ongoing atrocities, the framing of punishment as justice harms the ‘never again’ promise in several important ways: (i) it gives states the (undue) benefit of the doubt; (ii) it decontextualizes, individualizes, and exceptionalizes atrocities; (iii) it monopolizes discourses of accountability and condemnation, while sanitizing the suppression of dissenting voices; and (iv) it lends support to retaliatory impulses, distorting the discourse around the legitimate or lawful use of force in response to atrocities. We conclude by outlining the need to turn to more diverse and materially informed words, tools, and paradigms for naming, preventing, and standing in solidarity against abuses, in Palestine and elsewhere, that go beyond penal responses and directly engage with broader political and ethical conceptions of justice.

The article identifies and explains a phenomenon whereby states attempt to shift their responsibility in relation to missing persons and their families to the International Red Cross. This has dual effect: firstly, it leads to rightlessness of the missing and their families, and secondly, it diminishes the obligations of the states, which are the duty bearers. The attempted shift does not, however, lead to the International Red Cross becoming a duty bearer, despite undertaking crucial actions in the analyzed area. Two case studies, relating to two distinct types of missing persons, are used to illustrate the phenomenon: persons who disappeared during the conflict in Cyprus between 1963 and 1974, and migrants going missing in the Mediterranean.

Foreign national courts are categorically prohibited from prosecuting a head of state of another country. From the beginning of the twenty-first century until very recently, this view was nearly unanimous. A 2002 decision of the International Court of Justice, in the Arrest Warrant case, strongly supports it. According to the court, heads of state enjoy ‘full immunity’ from foreign criminal jurisdiction. Thus, the prohibition to prosecute foreign heads of state even extends to those who perpetrate aggression and other war-related crimes. That view is based on a twenty-first century myth. According to the myth, heads of state have long – ‘from time immemorial’ – enjoyed an absolute personal immunity from foreign jurisdiction. This article identifies the origin of the myth and parses through crucial historical facts that disprove it, particularly, the indictments against Hitler as the sitting head of state of Germany, their endorsement by the United Nations War Crimes Commission, and the judgment of the International Military Tribunal. A proper debunking of this myth is not only important as a matter of setting the historical record straight but is also relevant for present-day debates about the prosecution of heads of state (or heads of government) who – like Vladimir Putin, Bashar al-Assad, Min Aung Hlaing, and Benjamin Netanyahu – might be responsible for aggression, genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other crimes.