CIAO DATE: 10/2012
Volume: 23, Issue: 3
August 2012
A loyal reader recently sent me the following email: Just a quick note to let you know that EJIL and I.CON get the first and third position respectively in the general ranking of NON US Law Journals elaborated by Washington and Lee University School of Law (sections non US law journals) http://lawlib.wlu.edu/LJ/index.aspx Congratulations! The only reason I was happy to learn this exciting news was that no one will be able to dismiss what I am about to write as prompted by ‘sour grapes’.
Human Rights and the Environment: Where Next? (PDF)
Alan Boyle
The relationship between human rights and environmental protection in international law is far from simple or straightforward. A new attempt to codify and develop international law on this subject was initiated by the UNHRC in 2011. What can it say that is new or that develops the existing corpus of human rights law? Three obvious possibilities are explored in this article. First, procedural rights are the most important environmental addition to human rights law since the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. Any attempt to codify the law on human rights and the environment would necessarily have to take this development into account. Secondly, a declaration or protocol could be an appropriate mechanism for articulating in some form the still controversial notion of a right to a decent environment. Thirdly, the difficult issue of extra-territorial application of existing human rights treaties to transboundary pollution and global climate change remains unresolved. The article concludes that the response of human rights law - if it is to have one - needs to be in global terms, treating the global environment and climate as the common concern of humanity.
Global Public Goods amidst a Plurality of Legal Orders: A Symposium (PDF)
Fabrizio Cafaggi, David D. Caron
A public good (an example is a lighthouse) can be produced by private parties. However, they rarely are. Rather, such goods are generally thought of in economics as a type of commodity that government often provides and maintains because government can overcome the otherwise strong incentive to free ride on the efforts of others. This symposium issue is concerned with the global analogies to municipal public goods. As in the domestic context, global public goods are viewed as essential goods. But globally there is not a government. Instead, we observe a plurality of legal orders arrayed both horizontally and vertically, both publicly and privately. It is this mix of significance and complexity that is the subject of this symposium. Together, the American and European Societies of International Law (ASIL and ESIL) devised a research forum to explore whether and how the co-existence, interaction, and antagonisms of a plurality of legal orders (international law, domestic law, European Union law, regimes established by private actors) and their driving agents (regulators, contract-makers, and courts and tribunals) contribute to creating and maintaining global public goods. With additional support from and sponsorship by the European Journal of International Law (EJIL) and the HiiL Project on Transnational Private Regulation, a symposium with participants from Europe and the United States was held at the European University Institute in October of 2011. That two-day conference is the basis for the articles collected in this symposium issue.
What's in a Concept? Global Public Goods, International Law, and Legitimacy (PDF)
Daniel Bodansky
Although the terminology of global public goods may be new to international law scholarship, many of the principal features and implications of global public goods are familiar: global public goods are externalities writ large; they create incentives to free ride; and in many cases, they require international governance to provide. Nevertheless, the global public goods literature has been valuable in highlighting that global public goods come in different types, with different ‘production technologies’. Some depend on the aggregate effort of the entire group, while others depend on a ‘single best effort’ or on the ‘weakest link’. These different types of global public goods raise different governance issues and hence different challenges for international law.
International Law and Global Public Goods in a Legal Pluralist World (PDF)
Gregory Shaffer
The world faces multiple challenges in producing global public goods, such as climate change mitigation, financial stability, security from nuclear terror, knowledge production, and the eradication of infectious diseases. International law scholarship, in the meantime, takes a turn towards celebrating pluralism without sufficiently accounting for institutional variation to address different contexts. Those writing on global public goods challenges, at the same time, tend to come from disciplines other than law. So what is international law’s role in the production of global public goods? Where are greater international legal constraints and international institutions needed, and where should international law retain slack? Three analytic frameworks (global constitutionalism, global administrative law, and legal pluralism) have been advanced to address international law’s place in global governance, but these frameworks have not explicitly addressed the challenges of producing global public goods. This article breaks down different types of global public goods, and explores how these different frames apply to them. Grounded in pragmatism, the article shows why there is no single best approach. Rather, legal policy should be tailored to the type of global public good at stake in light of comparative, real world, institutional trade-offs.
Transnational Private Regulation and the Production of Global Public Goods and Private 'Bads' (PDF)
Fabrizio Cafaggi
The article focuses on the role of private regulators in the production, access regulation, and protection of global public goods (GPGs). It addresses transnational private regulation (TPR) as a public good in itself and as an instrument to produce and protect GPGs. It makes three major claims: (1) private actors have incentives to produce and protect GPGs, thereby challenging the conventional partition between markets, producing private goods, and states producing public goods; (2) the production and protection of GPGs has to combine procedural and substantive features, making private governance a determinant of the club or public nature of the global good; and (3) ownership, both individual and collective, and contracting can be used to produce and protect GPGs. The article analyses in particular the proliferation of regulatory agreements between private actors or between private and public to regulate production, protection, and access, and shows that their limited legal enforceability is often functional to alternative compliance mechanisms devised through innovative private governance. It concludes by suggesting that the increasing role of private actors in the production of GPGs requires governance reforms of public–private cooperation at transnational level.
Public and Private in the International Protection of Global Cultural Goods (PDF)
Francesco Francioni
The idea of cultural heritage as an ‘international public good’ can be traced back to the Preamble to the 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, according to which ‘damage to cultural property belonging to any people whatsoever means damage to the cultural heritage of all mankind, since each people makes its contribution to the culture of the world’. But how can this idea of cultural heritage as a global public good be reconciled with the infinite variety of cultural expressions and with the role of art as a medium essentially devoted to giving form to the plurality and diversity of tastes, beliefs, and inclinations of the different societies in which it is produced? In this article I will examine the issue of pluralism and legal interaction within three perspectives: (1) the plurality of different meanings of cultural property and cultural heritage; (2) the plurality and interaction between different legal regimes of protection – international and domestic, private and public, peacetime and wartime; and (3) the plurality and interaction between different mechanisms of enforcement at the international and domestic levels.
Free Lunches? WTO as Public Good, and the WTO's View of Public Goods (PDF)
Petros C. Mavroidis
The WTO can be viewed as a public good in that it provides a forum for negotiations which also produces the necessary legal framework to act as a support for agreed liberalization. To avoid any misunderstandings, in this article the discussion focuses on the WTO as a forum and a set of agreements, not on free trade. Since the legal agreements coming under its aegis are for good reasons incomplete, the WTO provides an additional public good by ‘completing’ the original contract through case law. The importance of this feature increases over time as tariffs are driven towards irrelevance. In turn, the WTO has no particular attitude towards public goods provided by its Members.
Elisa Morgera
The interaction between bilateral and multilateral action is evolving in the context of ‘global environmental law’ – a concept that is emerging from the promotion of environmental protection as a global public good through a plurality of legal mechanisms relying on a plurality of legal orders. The notion of global public goods can thus help one better to understand recent bilateral initiatives aimed at supporting the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements and the decisions of their compliance mechanisms. Innovative linkages between the compliance system under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and bilateral trade agreements recently concluded by the European Union and the US provide an example. Innovative opportunities for bilateral initiatives supporting the implementation of the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing are likely to lead to even more complex inter-relationships between different legal orders. This new approach to bilateralism that aims to support the interests of the international community can be assessed in the context of earlier debates on unilateralism, with a view to emphasizing the role of international law in the identification and delivery of global public goods, and the role of global environmental law in understanding the interactions among a plurality of legal orders.
International Adjudication of Global Public Goods: The Intersection of Substance and Procedure (PDF)
André Nollkaemper
This article, based on the non-controversial proposition that the way and degree in which international courts can contribute to the protection of a public good depends, in part, on the procedural law of such courts, sets out to expose the plurality of connections between procedure and substance. Procedures can further the substantive values of public goods but can also serve interests of their own and can even work against such substantive values. This article articulates the normative choices that courts inevitably have to make and reflects on the question of whether, and to what extent, the shaping of these connections is properly part of the international judicial function, taking into account problems of legitimacy that may arise when judge-made procedures undo state-made substantive law.
We deal in EJIL with the world we live in - often with its worst and most violent pathologies, often with its most promising signs of hope for a better world. But, inevitably, since our vehicle is scholarship, we reify this world.
Vahagn Avedian
By studying the continuity between the Ottoman Empire and its succeeding Turkish Republic, this article aims to address one crucial aspect of the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish state, namely the issue of state responsibility. There are psychological barriers in Turkey which have largely suppressed the memories of possible wrongdoings during World War I and the ensuing ‘Independence War’. However, the barrier that is created by the issue of state responsibility is identified here as the fundamental obstacle for genocide recognition by the Turkish state. This article aims to apply some of the existing legal principles and theories of international law in order to test their applicability to the two Turkish states and the issue of internationally wrongful acts committed during World War I and the ensuing years. In addition to the Turkish Republic bearing the identity of the Ottoman Empire, this article suggests that the Republic not only failed to stop doing the wrongful acts of its predecessor, but it also continued the very internationally wrongful acts committed by the Young Turk government. Thus, the insurgent National Movement, which later became the Republic, made itself responsible for not only its own wrongful acts but also those of its predecessor, including the act of genocide committed in 1915–1916. The issue of possible liability has ever since the creation of the Republic formed the denialist policy which is Turkey’s to this day.
Pulat Tacar, Maxime Gauin
We have been asked by the European Journal of International Law to write a reply to an article entitled ‘State Identity, Continuity and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide’. The article accuses Turkey of ‘practising a denialist policy’ with regard to ‘the act of genocide committed during 1915–1916’, demanding that it ‘make itself responsible for its own internationally wrongful acts committed against Armenians and other Christian minorities’, and also accuses it of ‘expanding the massacres beyond its borders into the Caucasus and the territories of the independent Republic of Armenia’. According to the same article, there is a state succession and continuation of responsibility from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, and the Republic must assume full responsibility for and should also repair the injury caused by the Ottoman Empire.
The Peremptory Norms of the International Community (PDF)
William E. Conklin
This article claims that the quest for the identity of peremptory norms in terms of sources is misdirected. Instead of the identity of a discrete rule or right of international law, one needs to examine why a peremptory norm is binding. The latter issue addresses the referent of the identity issue: namely, the international community as a whole. Various significations of the latter are recognized and found wanting. The article examines three general forms of the international community: the community as an aggregate of inter-dependent states, the community as a rational construction, and the community as a social-cultural ethos independent of members and yet for the members. The first two forms are found wanting. First, they presuppose that a state is a self-creative author expressing its own will. Secondly, the community is reified vis-à-vis the social-cultural ethos in which the community is immersed. Thirdly, the community is exclusionary.
Peremptory Norms of the International Community: A Reply to William E. Conklin (PDF)
Alexander Orakhelashvili
Professor Conklin’s analytical effort to explain the nature of jus cogens is not only highly impressive, but also very timely. It demonstrates the continuing relevance of jus cogens as it increasingly arises in multiple areas of international law, regardless of doctrinal calls from the 1980s onwards that it should have faded away.1 Since then, there have been those who have suggested that jus cogens does not make sense and should be abandoned,2 those who suggest that jus cogens has merely aspirational relevance and does not make a difference on the ground,3 and those who argue that jus cogens is merely ‘primary’ law, not to be applied in the area of enforcement.4 What happens interestingly – and problematically – is that doctrinal debates on the conceptual rationale of jus cogens and on its more specific effects are often pursued separately. Conklin’s contribution is a gentle reminder of the crucial issues of the background and essence of jus cogens that both writers and practitioners often tend to overlook when addressing the implications of jus cogens in specific areas of international law.
The Peremptory Norms of the International Community: A Rejoinder to Alexander Orakhelashvili (PDF)
William E. Conklin
Alexander Orakhelashvili has generously responded to my ‘The Peremptory Norms of the International Community’ with an understanding which requires a clarification on my part. On the one hand, consistently with my argument, he urges the departure from the ‘“cut and paste” repetition’ of the sources of law. Such sources offer an ‘ordinary, or mainline, justification’ which is ‘insufficient or irrelevant’ to justify peremptory norms. On the other hand, he insists that ‘none of this is meant to challenge positivist foundations of international law’. Although he emphasizes public policy as an important factor in that foundation, he also highlights fundamental values and the will, choices and universality of an international community. Orakhelashvili adds that the international social ethos, which I privileged, was ‘a correct premise for jus cogens, but not a sufficient one’. What is also needed, he advises, is that the ethos be given ‘a legal expression’ or language. When the nature of such a legal language is addressed, one is advised that the language remains a ‘consensual positivism’. Public policy is emphasized as such an expression commonly accepted in domestic and international legal discourses, we are advised.
Andreas Wagner
This review discusses two recent publications – a critical edition of a primary source and a collection of essays – around the Theory of International Law of Alberico Gentili (1552–1608). On the one hand it examines Gentili’s interest in ancient Rome and how he used it as a paradigmatic case of imperial order. But on the other, it questions our own interest in Gentili’s work. In line with Gentili’s own focus on questions of justice, it not only shows that Gentili presents us with his own complex blend of political responsibility and natural law, but highlights structural features and possible blind spots of his ‘natural/private law’ paradigm that might apply also to current suggestions of how to organize international law.
Muin Boase, Mansur Boase
The book under review, which was awarded an ASIL Certificate of Merit, critically examines international law in the period following decolonization. Engaging both legal history and philosophy, the gnawing question which motivates this work, and risks getting lost under the wealth of scholarship, is: ‘Why has international law failed the Third World?’. The author claims that in order to answer this question, we must trace how a development thesis has been universalized and expose the transformative dynamic of a new ruling rationality based on the twin concepts of development and economic growth. The outcome is a regulatory framework, universally applied, which has subsumed the creative promise of international law. The claim is not that international law has shifted the operation of power, but rather that international law has itself become a new mode of power. Despite affirming political equality, the Third World, by avowing economic backwardness, unwittingly endorsed a rhetoric of development and a separation of the economic from the political. Once institutionalized through the Bretton Woods Institutions and the United Nations respectively, this disembedding of economics from politics, which we know from Polanyi’s The Great Transformation (1944) can only ever be an illusion, has facilitated a new imperialism of international economic law in the national arena. The historical repercussions are well known: the ever-expanding reach of an international technical law positioned as superior to national law, intervening, often violently, to maintain an unfavourable and asymmetric status quo in the name of idealized economic, political, and social models that cast themselves as universal. This pattern is well documented in Anghie’s Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2004). Anghie argues that the branding of the ‘other’ as uncivilized and particular does not emerge from universals, but rather animates their formation.
Individual Contributions to Fault Lines of International Legitimacy (PDF)
Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko
Legitimacy has become a popular subject in international law and international relations in the last decade. If previously the issue of legitimacy was addressed only subsidiarily to other issues, today books and articles taking the issue of legitimacy as their main subject abound. The books under review illustrate this trend. They all address ‘legitimacy’, but approach the notion from different perspectives.
National Courts and the International Rule of Law (PDF)
Giuseppe Cataldi
The book under review concludes research on the practice of domestic courts begun by the author over 10 years ago as part of a project entitled International Law in Domestic Courts. As pointed out in the preface, international doctrine lacked a systematic analysis of the domestic judicial application of international law, one based not on a theorization of relations between domestic law and international law but on an accurate analysis of data emanating from the decisions of domestic courts. The gap has now been filled by this truly commendable work. Access to national cases was facilitated by the continuing publication of national case law in International Law Reports and the Oxford Reports on International Law. Nevertheless the amount of judicial data assembled and examined in this book is truly impressive, and highly useful for an understanding of the actual and potential role of national courts in the protection of the international rule of law. The merit of this book, in our opinion, lies in the fact that it sheds light on numerous concepts in respect of which there is often uncertainty, specifically because their definition rests on solely theoretical constructs rather than on an objective analysis of practice.
World Trade Law after Neoliberalism. Re-imagining the Global Economic Order. (PDF)
Michael Fakhri
Accounts of trade law usually are written in a technical style or focus on the WTO’s legitimacy. Nevertheless, an increasing number of scholars are asking theoretical questions regarding why WTO law is structured as it is and operates the way it does. Some look to political or economic theory to answer the question. Lang, like some others, focuses more on social dynamics.
Mónica García-Salmones
The two books reviewed here invite international lawyers to mobilize. Jean D’Aspremont’s Formalism calls for a renewal of the practice of formally ascertaining international legal rules. D’Aspremont attempts to develop a theory for this endeavour to be employed in an age of pluralized normativity. Essentially this theory is grounded in a social thesis with robust Hartian support. Jörg Kammerhofer’s Uncertainty in International Law, for its part, argues in favour of a much more theoretical approach to international law, one that is normativist and, more specifically, Kelsenian.
Osama bin Laden is Dead (PDF)
Gregory Shaffer
Osama bin Laden is dead. Killed by the Americans in Abbottabad, a garrison town in the night on a skillful raid, photographed dead, but without the pictures released, dumped at sea in debated accordance with debated scripture, from an un-debated carrier, it seems.