The transfer of intermediate and lower rank indictees from the International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda to competent national jurisdictions is a central component of the so-called completion strategy. When the ad hoc Tribunals contemplate the referral of a case, however, they find themselves hemmed in from two sides. On the one hand, a decision to refer a case will appear justified only if there are strong reasons to believe that national proceedings will be conducted in accordance with international due process standards. On the other hand, the risk that national authorities deny or minimise the responsibility of transferred indictees must be avoided. These two exigencies were given positive expression in the Rules of Procedure and Evidence of both Tribunals, under Rule 11bis. This paves the way for a comparison between Rule 11bis case law and human rights jurisprudence concerning potential violations. For the purposes of this article, comparative analysis provides the basis for asserting that, when the ad hoc Tribunals decide whether or not to refer a case under Rule 11bis, they are bound by human rights standards which go beyond the right to receive a fair trial and are stricter than those normally applicable to a state which is about to extradite or expel an individual.

On 13 October 2005, the International Criminal Court (ICC) Pre-Trial Chamber II unsealed the warrants of arrest for five senior leaders of the Lord's Resistance Army/Movement (LRA/M) for crimes against humanity and war crimes committed in Uganda since July 2002. While these warrants were yet to be executed, the Ugandan government entered negotiations with the LRA/M rebels. As a result Uganda's President Yoweri Museveni, disregarding the ICC arrest warrants, announced a ‘total amnesty’ for the LRA combatants in July 2006 on the condition that the rebels renounced terrorism and accepted peace. Following the amnesty offer, an agreement on cessation of hostilities between the Ugandan government and the LRA/M was concluded with effect from 29 August 2006. This article considers the question whether a ‘total amnesty’ to individuals indicted by the ICC may be binding upon the ICC.

While there have been increasing demands for strengthening UN capacity for peacebuilding, recent peacebuilding operations under UN transitional territorial administration have obscured and downgraded the importance of normative and legal questions and have failed to address the right to self-determination in substance. It is argued that the legal issues surrounding such operations, including the legal basis for establishing transitional administrations, the legal status of the territories under administration and the legal regulations governing the powers given to UN administrators, must be contemplated in such a way as to focus fully on the internal and substantive aspects of the peoples' right to self-determination.

To-date, the proliferation and unrestricted transfers of small arms and light weapons (SALW) pose a threat to peace and security, particularly in conflict torn regions and countries. As part of collective responses to this problem, the Security Council intensified Chapter VII arms embargoes in the aftermath of the Cold War. These bans are arguably seen by many as the only legal restrictions on the trade in SALW under international law. However, due to a lack of appropriate monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, the bans are often violated by states and non-state actors. In response to this the Council has taken a range of steps, including establishing and empowering sanctions' committees, monitoring panels and groups of experts, to oversee compliance and conduct investigations on alleged violations. This article inquires into three areas of interest: first, the link between the small arms challenge and international peace and security and the powers and responsibilities of the Security Council to respond to this challenge; secondly, the nature, scope and major problems of the embargoes; and finally, the features of recent developments in the application of the bans. It is submitted that whilst the inherent problems of these bans, most crucially the lack of political commitment of states to comply with the measures and respond to violations remain to be persistent contemporary challenges, the newly introduced monitoring mechanisms are positive attributes to the effectiveness of the embargoes.

In the practice of modern international law, if a certain understanding is advanced as the correct interpretation of a treaty provision, the proposition is assessed using the rules of interpretation laid down in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, Articles 31–33. This article is concerned with the relationship held in such an interpretation process between the preparatory work of a treaty – described as a supplementary means of interpretation in Article 32 – and the three primary means of interpretation that can be used by an interpreter citing Article 31. Judged by the wordings of Articles 31 and 32, the relationship between the primary and the supplementary means of interpretation is hierarchical. As a consequence, preparatory work may be used to determine the correct meaning of a treaty provision, only on the condition that in the earlier stages of the interpretation process, the application of Article 31 has been found to leave the meaning of the interpreted treaty ‘ambiguous or obscure’, or to lead to a result ‘which is manifestly absurd or unreasonable’. Several scholars in the area have recently argued for granting the preparatory work of a treaty a more prominent role in the interpretation process. As this article will show, such a claim builds on arguments that do not stand up to careful legal analysis. It should, therefore, be discarded as unsound.