Through an analysis of UN operations including international territorial administration, refugee camps, peacekeeping, the implementation of sanctions and the provision of humanitarian aid, Guglielmo Verdirame shows that the powers exercised by the UN carry a serious risk of human rights abuse. The International Law Commission has codified and developed the law of institutional responsibility, but, while indispensable, these principles and rules cannot on their own ensure compliance and accountability. The 'liberty deficit' of the UN and of other international organisations, thus remains an...

Several current international legal issues are related to the concept of legal personality, including the determination of international rights and duties of non-state actors and the legal capacities of transnational institutions. When addressing these issues, different understandings of legal personality are employed. These concepts consider different entities to be international persons, state different criteria for becoming one and attach different consequences to being one. Roland Portmann systematizes the different positions on international personality by spelling out the assumptions on...

This analysis of Hans Kelsen's international law theory takes into account the context of the German international legal discourse in the first half of the twentieth century, including the reactions of Carl Schmitt and other Weimar opponents of Kelsen. The relationship between his Pure Theory of Law and his international law writings is examined, enabling the reader to understand how Kelsen tried to square his own liberal cosmopolitan project with his methodological convictions as laid out in his Pure Theory of Law. Finally, Jochen von Bernstorff discusses the limits and continuing relevance...

In this evaluation of the international legal standing of the right to reparation and its practical implementation at the national level, Christine Evans outlines State responsibility and examines the jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice, the Articles on State Responsibility of the International Law Commission and the convergence of norms in different branches of international law, notably human rights law, humanitarian law and international criminal law. Case studies of countries in which the United Nations has played a significant role in peace negotiations and post-conflict...

Alongside existing regimes for victim redress at the national and international levels, in the coming years international criminal law and, in particular, the International Criminal Court, will potentially provide a significant legal framework through which the harm caused by egregious conduct can be addressed. Drawing on a wealth of comparative experience, Conor McCarthy's study of the Rome Statute's regime of victim redress provides a comprehensive exploration of this framework, examining both its reparations regime and its scheme for the provision of victim support through the ICC Trust...

Forum shopping, which consists of strategic forum selection, parallel litigation and serial litigation, is a phenomenon of growing importance in international adjudication. Preliminary objections (or a party's placement of conditions on the existence and development of the adjudicatory process) have been traditionally conceived as barriers to adjudication before single forums. This book discusses how adjudicators and parties may refer to questions of jurisdiction and admissibility in order to avoid conflicting decisions on overlapping cases, excessive exercises of jurisdiction and the...

Climate change and rising oil prices have thrust the Arctic to the top of the foreign policy agenda and raised difficult issues of sovereignty, security and environmental protection. Improved access for shipping and resource development is leading to new international rules on safety, pollution prevention and emergency response. Around the Arctic, maritime boundary disputes are being negotiated and resolved, and new international institutions, such as the Arctic Council, are mediating deep-rooted tensions between Russia and NATO and between nation states and indigenous peoples. International...

Treaty conflicts are not merely the contingent or inadvertent by-products of the increasing juridification of international relations. In several instances, states have deliberately created treaty conflicts in order to catalyse changes in multilateral regimes. Surabhi Ranganathan uses such conflicts as context to explore the role of international law, in legal thought and practice. Her examinations of the International Law Commission's work on treaties and of various scholars' proposals on institutional action, offer a fresh view of 'mainstream' legal thought. They locate, in a variety of...

This examination of the role of litigation in addressing the problem of climate change focuses not only on how the massive and growing number of lawsuits influences regulation directly, but also on how the lawsuits shape corporate behaviour and public opinion. It provides readers with an understanding of how these lawsuits have shaped approaches to mitigation and adaptation, and have been used to try to force and to block regulation. There is a particular emphasis on lawsuits in the United States and Australia, the two jurisdictions which have had the most climate change litigation in the...

Is the neglect of economic, social and cultural abuses in international criminal law a problem of positive international law or the result of choices made by lawyers involved in mechanisms such as criminal prosecutions or truth commissions? Evelyne Schmid explores this question via an assessment of the relationship between violations of economic, social and cultural rights and international crimes. Based on a thorough examination of the elements of international crimes, she demonstrates how a situation can simultaneously be described as a violation of economic, social and cultural rights and...