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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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.

Treaties are the most visible, some would even say the ‘main source of international law’. This is true not only at the global level, but even more so in Europe. However, these treaties hardly explain the idiosyncratic, sometimes exceptionalist ways in which international law is identified, interpreted, and applied in this region. Still less do they explain the disproportionate normative influence of European legal rules outside Europe. Attributing these particularities and imbalances to ‘eurocentrism’ in international law is considered almost a truism these days. Yet, when examining how the European legal tradition translates into positive international law one category of rules has received little attention so far: the unwritten European rules that are resorted to within and beyond Europe. The idea of ‘unwritten’ European rules is not only historically charged but also conceptually vague. However, this article argues that a close analysis of their role is central to both understanding and overcoming the persistence of ‘eurocentrism’ in international law. To demonstrate this claim, the article introduces the term ‘unwritten’ European rules in international law. A historical section illustrates their ambivalent role since the beginning of the nineteenth century. It then analyses the continuing relevance of unwritten European rules in contemporary legal practice. The final section discusses how a common framework of secondary rules can help to distinguish between hegemonic and integrative uses of unwritten European rules, before concluding.

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.

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.

This article addresses how air services agreements (ASAs) are starting to be used to regulate carbon emissions from international aviation. International aviation is regulated by a combination of multilateral aviation-specific conventions and bilateral ASAs. The Chicago Convention of 1944 and annexes that contain the Standards and Recommended Practices (SARPs) are the primary multilateral sources of international aviation law. These SARPs mainly cover the technical requirements of aviation safety with the notable exception of Annex 16: Environmental Protection. With the goal of reducing the climate impact of aviation-related carbon emissions, the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) was adopted as SARPs. However, the legal status of SARPs remains controversial. Since they are not an integral part of the Chicago Convention, they do not have the same legal force as the convention itself. Although the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) adopts and manages SARPs, it lacks a way to enforce compliance. Despite this limitation, however, bilateral ASAs give SARPs legal force. ASAs determine the level of aviation market access between states, and most ASAs permit the imposition of operational bans in case of non-compliance with SARPs on safety standards. From exclusively dealing with the exchange of commercial rights for international air transport, a new generation of ASAs has started to cover environmental protection. Based on a review of 620 publicly available ASAs, this article assesses how SARPs on aviation safety are effectively enforced by ASAs and anticipates how SARPs on carbon emissions will gradually follow suit.

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.