International Law Commons^™

Strengthening The Southern African Development Community: A Critique Of The International Labor Organization's Development Assistance In Swaziland And Zimbabwe, Desiree Leclercq

Scholarly Works

Insufficient labor policies contribute to poverty, while those poverty conditions contribute to limited employment opportunities and labor rights abuses. Traditional multilateral lending institutions, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, provide development aid but tend to treat labor policies as incompatible with efficient market functioning. The International Labor Organization (ILO), on the other hand, provides development assistance specifically targeting labor policies. Unlike traditional lending institutions, the ILO's assistance imposes no conditions. Instead, the ILO's mandate requires it to design its programs in consultation with the recipient country's government and social partners.

This article studies the ILO's assistance …

In Defense Of Territorial Jurisdiction, Cody Jacobs

Faculty Scholarship

As the story is traditionally told, the minimum contacts test introduced in International Shoe v Washington freed personal jurisdiction from the dark age of territorialism and gave courts the flexibility to expand the scope of personal jurisdiction to keep pace with modern society. While scholars have critiqued the minimum contacts test on a number of grounds, the narrative that the Territorial Model was inherently problematic—and that Shoe was a step in the right direction— has gone largely unchallenged.

This Article challenges that narrative and argues for a return to the Territorial Model. While Shoe is traditionally cast as a step …

Victims And Press After War: Tensions Between Privacy, Historical Truth And Freedom Of Expression, Vivian Newman-Pont, Maria P. Angel, Maria Ximena Davila

Scholarly Works

The drive to conduct this research was born out of the tension that developed on May of 2017 in the context of the journalistic coverage of the exhumations of those who died in the Bojayá massacre.   Thus, this document has the purpose of asking and answering, from a socio-legal perspective, the following question: How can the events related to the armed conflict and to the transition to peace be narrated without violating the right to privacy of the victims? Or, how can a journalist record a dramatic event or recount an injuste that moves readers while respecting the limits of …

The Story Of The Dubai International Financial Centre Courts: A Retrospective, Jayanth K. Krishnan

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Can Western-based, English-speaking, common law commercial courts operate successfully in an environment that are not their own—such as in the Middle East? This question is not a simple thought experiment but rather the reality that has occurred since the mid-2000s in the Emirate of Dubai. This monograph recounts the history of how the ‘Dubai International Financial Centre Courts’ emerged. Drawing on extensive interviews with key stakeholders involved in the process, along with rich original documents as well as all of the Courts’ judgments, this narrative offers important lessons for those seeking to understand more fully the complex interplay of how …

Cyber Law And Espionage Law As Communicating Vessels, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution is "Cyber Law and Espionage Law as Communicating Vessels," pp. 203-225.

Existing legal literature would have us assume that espionage operations and “below-the-threshold” cyber operations are doctrinally distinct. Whereas one is subject to the scant, amorphous, and under-developed legal framework of espionage law, the other is subject to an emerging, ever-evolving body of legal rules, known cumulatively as cyber law. This dichotomy, however, is erroneous and misleading. In practice, espionage and cyber law function as communicating vessels, and so are better conceived as two elements of a complex system, Information Warfare (IW). This paper therefore first draws …

Politics, Power Dynamics, And The Limits Of Existing Self-Regulation And Oversight In Icc Preliminary Examinations, Asaf Lubin

Books & Book Chapters by Maurer Faculty

Professor Lubin's contribution to volume 2 is titled, "Politics, Power Dynamics, and the Limits of Existing Self-Regulation and Oversight in ICC Preliminary Examinations," pp. 77-150.

Should the normative framework that governs the International Criminal Court’s (‘ICC’) oversight concerning preliminary examinations undergo a reform? The following chapter answers this question in the affirmative, making the claim that both self-regulation by the Office of the Prosecutor (‘OTP’) and quality control by the Pre-Trial Chamber (‘PTC’) currently suffer from significant deficiencies, thus failing to reach the optimum point on the scale between absolute prosecutorial discretion and absolute control. The chapter demonstrates some of …

Conclusions: The Value Of An Innovation Framework For International Law, Alastair Neil Craik, Sara Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The concluding chapter to Global Environmental Change and Innovation in International Law provides an assessment of the value of an innovation framework for further scholarship in the field of international environmental law. The authors note that thinking more systematically about how international law structures innovation and how innovation within law arises has potential to generate new insights into the role of law in the development of sustainable transitions and may provoke greater attention to the sources and processes of legal transformations themselves. Identifying the constraints to legal innovation, particularly in the context of increasingly complex system demands, was identified as …

Submission To The Open Call For Input Regarding The Working Group’S Report On The Gender Lens To The Un Guiding Principles On Business And Human Rights, Sara Seck, Penelope Simons

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

In October 2017, we co-hosted a conference and policy meeting on the subject of extractive industries and the human rights of women and girls, at the Human Rights Resource Education Centre in Ottawa. This submission will reflect on some of the insights that emerged from the conference and policy meeting, as well as our own subsequent research. A selection of conference papers are forthcoming in a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Women and the Law. We have inserted our submissions in response to some of the specific questions raised by the Working Group.

Copla: A Transnational Criminal Court For Latin America & The Caribbean, Robert Currie, Jacob Leon

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

States in the Latin American and Caribbean regions have long called for the creation of an independent, international court to prosecute members of transnational organized crime gangs. These organizations not only profit from the illicit traffic in drugs, people and cultural property, but are able to corrupt and undermine the domestic legal systems and judiciaries of the affected states. This paper examines the current proposal for the creation of the "Latin American and Caribbean Criminal Court Against Transnational Organized Crime" (COPLA). It reviews the rationale for creating such a court, examines the main pillars of the current proposal, and suggests …

The Effect Of International Ngos On Influencing Domestic Policy And Law, Ashley Macarchuk

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis attempts to understand the impact of international human rights and environmental NGOs on affecting domestic policy and law. In particular, it looks at how State-NGO relations, civil society, and accountability affect the success of international NGOs in enacting change in domestic policy. The focus is on four countries with some of the largest human rights and environmental abuses: Argentina, China, India, and Russia. Through these countries, this thesis shows that NGOs have the most influence when State-NGO relations are strong, civil society is active, and NGOs are accountable to both the State and citizens. A key component to …

Copla: A Transnational Criminal Court For Latin America & The Caribbean, Robert Currie, Jacob Leon

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

States in the Latin American and Caribbean regions have long called for the creation of an independent, international court to prosecute members of transnational organized crime gangs. These organizations not only profit from the illicit traffic in drugs, people and cultural property, but are able to corrupt and undermine the domestic legal systems and judiciaries of the affected states. This paper examines the current proposal for the creation of the "Latin American and Caribbean Criminal Court Against Transnational Organized Crime" (COPLA). It reviews the rationale for creating such a court, examines the main pillars of the current proposal, and suggests …

Edging Towards Principled Ocean Governance: Law Of The Sea And Beyond, David Vanderzwaag

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Elisabeth Mann Borgese is well known for her commitment to advancing the legal order for the improved regulation of the world’s oceans. Her advocacy with respect to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) is the subject of other essays in this volume. However, in the decades since 1982, legal principles, sometimes linked to provisions in treaties, have become critical in the global quest for sustainable seas and healthy coastal communities. Principles, such as precautionary and ecosystem approaches, have influenced the negotiation, implementation, and interpretation of international agreements. They may also guide national ocean law and …

Paris To Projects Research Initiative, Robert B. Gibson, Karine Peloffy, Meinhard Doelle

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

This working paper explores the key components and provisions that need to be incorporated into impact assessment legislation to ensure that assessed undertakings help meet Canadian climate change mitigation commitments and duties.

This discussion paper includes a summary that serves as a basic briefing note on the core climate components that should be included in the new federal legislation. It also includes a box presenting the tests for determining an undertaking's contributions to meeting Canada's international climate change mitigation commitments, and a more detailed discussion of implications for the new law.

Towards Ocean Peace: Resolving Disputes Cooperatively And Empathetically Through Negotiation, Nayha Acharya

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Oceans have immeasurable value. They are replete with natural resources and food sources; they enable transportation and recreation; they regulate earth’s climate. In sum, they make invaluable contributions to our physical, economic, and political well-being. And wherever there is something valuable, there are disputes over how that value should be maintained, grown, owned, and distributed. Internationally, disputes over maritime boundaries, access routes, drilling rights, and resource exploration are prolific. A sizeable bulk of international litigation is generated by ocean disputes. In the domestic context, disagreement among stakeholders as to environmental quality and pollution, natural resource management and conservation, geo-engineering, and …

A Cure From Rome For Montreal’S Illness: Article 5 Of The Rome I Regulation And Filling The Void In The 1999 Montreal Convention’S Regulation Of Carrier’S Liability For Personal Injury, Yehya I. Ibrahim Badr

Journal of Air Law and Commerce

An examination of the 1999 Montreal Convention shows that the drafters did not intend to lay down a comprehensive treaty that would organize a carrier’s liability for personal injury to passengers. They opted to achieve a certain level of uniformity through enacting a set of rules that tackled several key issues such as the grounds for a carrier’s liability, the available defenses, and the limits on the recoverable damages. Consequently, some unaddressed issues created a void in the Montreal Convention and were then left without a clear remedy. In this article, a distinction is made between two types of voids: …

Lessons For The Treaty Process From The International Law Commission And International Environmental Law, Sara L. Seck

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The chapter examines Amnesty case studies in order to document the state practice identified and the gaps that need to be filled. The chapter will then consider the work of the ILC in its progressive codification of the law on prevention and loss allocation with respect to transboundary harm arising from hazardous activities, culminating in draft Articles8 and draft Principles,9 respectively, in 2001 and 2006. The modest claim of this chapter is that as the key United Nations body responsible for the progressive development and codification of international law, the work of the ILC should surely be of relevance to …

Testing International Legal Regimes: The Advent Of Automated Commercial Vessels, Aldo Chircop

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

International shipping is on the eve of a new era where remotely controlled and partially or fully automated and unmanned Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships (MASS) will be carrying international trade. The regulation of navigation and shipping in the contemporary international law of the sea and international maritime law are premised on human presence and control onboard ships. Provisions of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, 1982 and several maritime conventions will need to be revisited to determine how MASS may be accommodated, and where not possible, what further legal development may be needed. Recently, the IMO …

The Quest For Justice For Victims Of Terrorism: International Law And The Immunity Of States In Canada And The United States, Karinne Lantz

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The paper begins with an overview of international law and the principle of state immunity, which is included to provide a necessary introduction for readers who are unfamiliar with these topics. Part two assesses the practice of Canada and the United States by examining the legislated exceptions to state immunity that allows claims against foreign states that sponsor terrorism, as well as the decision in Tracy (Appeal). Part three returns to international law and explores the decision of the ICJ in Jurisdictional Immunities. This examination calls into question whether, through Tracy (Appeal), Canada has violated Iran’s right to …

Conclusions: The Value Of An Innovation Framework For International Law, Sara L. Seck, Alastair Neil Craik

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

The concluding chapter to Global Environmental Change and Innovation in International Law provides an assessment of the value of an innovation framework for further scholarship in the field of international environmental law. The authors note that thinking more systematically about how international law structures innovation and how innovation within law arises has potential to generate new insights into the role of law in the development of sustainable transitions and may provoke greater attention to the sources and processes of legal transformations themselves. Identifying the constraints to legal innovation, particularly in the context of increasingly complex system demands, was identified as …

User-Generated Evidence, Rebecca Hamilton

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Around the world, people are using their smartphones to document atrocities. This Article is the first to address the implications of this important development for international criminal law. While acknowledging the potential benefits such user-generated evidence could have for international criminal investigations, the Article identifies three categories of concern related to its use: (i) user security; (ii) evidentiary bias; and (iii) fair trial rights. In the absence of safeguards, user-generated evidence may address current problems in international criminal justice at the cost of creating new ones and shifting existing problems from traditional actors, who have institutional backing, to individual users …

Book Review Some Kind Of Justice: The Icty's Impact In Bosnia And Serbia, Diane Orentlicher, Ivan Vukusic

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In December 2017, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague closed, 25 years after it was set up by the United Nation's Security Council (UN sc) Resolution 827. That decision by the UN SC, primarily in response to the brutality of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), completely changed the landscape of international law. American legal scholar Diane Orentlicher, a seasoned observer of the ICTY, provides in this book the most detailed assessment of its record to date. Countless journal articles, books, documentaries and panels, in the former Yugoslavia, The Hague and elsewhere discussed …

Academy On Human Rights And Humanitarian Law Articles And Essays On Emerging Challenges In The Relationship Between International Humanitarian Law And International Human Rights Law: Introduction, Claudia Martin, Diego Rodriguez-Pinzon

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

We are delighted to present this year's publication of the Academy on Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, which includes the three best essays in English and in Spanish recognized in the 2017 Human Rights Essay Award competition. It is satisfying to think that this competition allowed a number of participants an opportunity to expound their thoughts on so many important topics and areas of the world. We hope these participants are able to use their articles as mechanisms for change.

Sovereignty In The Age Of Cyber, Gary Corn

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

International law is a foundational pillar of the modern international order, and its applicability to both state and nonstate cyber activities is, by now, beyond question. However, owing to the unique and rapidly evolving nature of cyberspace, its ubiquitous interconnectivity, its lack of segregation between the private and public sectors, and its incompatibility with traditional concepts of geography, there are difficult and unresolved questions about exactly how international law applies to this domain. Chief among these is the question of the exact role that the principle of sovereignty plays in regulating states' cyber activities.

A Human Rights Based Approach To International Financial Regulatory Standards, Daniel D. Bradlow

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Globalization and information and communication technologies pushed national financial regulators to establish international standard setting bodies (SSBs) which promote non-binding international financial regulatory standards. However, finance inevitably has social and human rights impacts and the SSBs and their members are not meeting their responsibility to account for these impacts in their international standards. This failure means that financial regulators and institutions may under-estimate the risks associated with their operations leading to misallocations of credit, less safe financial institutions and less efficient and transparent financial markets. To avoid this problem, SSBs should adopt a human rights approach to standard setting. The …

Assessing The Potential For Global Economic Governance Reform, Daniel D. Bradlow

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Every dynamic social system’s adaptive capacity is finite. Eventually, the ability of the system’s legal and institutional arrangements to adapt to the changing operational context is exhausted. At this point, unless the system is significantly reformed, it begins losing its legitimacy and efficacy.

This article contends that the structure, operation and scale of the global economy has changed so dramatically that the current arrangements for global economic governance are approaching this crisis moment. They are failing to deliver an inclusive, sustainable and efficient international economic system that can contribute to peace, prosperity and human welfare. Their governance arrangements and operating …

Scaling Development Finance For Our Common Future, Daniel D. Bradlow, Kevin P. Gallagher, Leandro Serino, Jose Siaba Serrate

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

The G-20 and the broader world community has committed to ambitious goals to close global infrastructure gaps, mitigate climate change, and advance the 2030 Agenda for development. We call on G20 leaders to task development finance institutions (DFIs) such as the development banks in member countries and the Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) of which G-20 countries are members, to commit to scaling up resources by 25 percent, to calibrate new financing to international commitments to mitigate climate change and the 2030 agenda, and to work together as an inclusive system toward achieving those shared goals.

International Financial Regulatory Standards And Human Rights: Connecting The Dots, Daniel D. Bradlow, Motoko Aizawa, Margaret Wachenfeld

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This paper’s hypothesis is that the international standard setting bodies (SSBs) could improve the quality of their international standards by incorporating a human rights analysis. It focuses on five SSBs and seven of their international standards and its findings include the following: First, the standards all implicate the right of non-discrimination, and the rights to information, privacy and an effective remedy. Second, they each raises economic, social and cultural rights issues, including the obligation to allocate ‘maximum available resources’ to the progressive realization of economic, social and cultural rights; the human rights responsibilities of private actors exercising delegated regulatory authority, …

Rehabilitation In Article 14 Of The Convention Against Torture And Other Cruel, Inhuman, Or Degrading Treatment Or Punishment, Claudio Grossman, Nora Sevaass, Felice Gaer

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

Persons exposed to torture have suffered serious attacks on their lives, relationships, health, and sense of dignity. The torture they experienced will remain a part of them even if they manage to move ahead and work through the pain. The destructive power of torture affects life on so many levels: mind and body, values and relationships, and the capacity for work and leisure. Providing opportunities to reconstruct lives after torture should be a priority in the international effort to prevent and prohibit torture. International recognition of the right to redress, including rehabilitation for all victims of torture and other cruel, …

Human Rights Protections In International Supply Chains—Protecting Workers And Managing Company Risk: 2018 Report And Model Contract Clauses From The Working Group To Draft Human Rights Protections In International Supply Contracts, Aba Section Of Business Law, David Snyder

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

This report and the model contract clauses that it contains are an effort to help companies provide legally effective and operationally likely human rights protections for workers in international supply chains. The report is the product of the Working Group to Draft Human Rights Protections in International Supply Contracts, which is a unit of the American Bar Association Business Law Section. After identifying the problems, such as human trafficking and factory collapses as well as developing compliance obligations under federal, state, and foreign law, the report explains the difficulty of drafting legally effective clauses. Most of the issues result from …

Criminalization And The Politics Of Migration In Brazil, Jayesh Rathod

Scholarly Articles in Law Reviews & Journals

In May 2017, the government of Brazil enacted a new immigration law, replacing a statute introduced in 1980 during the country’s military dictatorship with progressive legislation that advances human rights principles and adopts innovative approaches to migration management. One of the most notable features of the new law is its explicit rejection of the criminalization of migration, and its promotion of efforts to regularize undocumented migrants. Although the law itself is new, the values embedded in the law reflect recent trends in Brazilian immigration policy, which has embraced legalization, and has generally resisted the use of criminal law to punish …