Codified in Articles 27 and 15(1)(a) of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] and International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights [ICESCR], respectively, cultural rights are still read as distinct from linguistic and religious freedoms. The ICCPR vests cultural rights only in “persons belonging to minorities”, instead of groups. This paper attempts to analyze the reasons for the deficiencies in the ICCPR/ICESCR cultural rights regimes. In so doing, it unpacks the implications of these deficiencies for three current conflicts in Asia—the alleged persecution of Rohingyas in Myanmar, Uighurs in China, and Kashmiri Muslims in India—which are replete with cultural rights violations. It then tests whether the richer culture-based jurisprudence in international criminal law can offer lessons for the recalibration of cultural rights under the ICCPR/ICESCR. In particular, whether such cross-fertilization can trigger the jurisdiction of alternative forums to enforce state responsibility for these violations.

Radhabinod Pal, a judge at the Tokyo Tribunal, wrote a dissenting opinion absolving all the accused Japanese of the alleged crimes. In so doing, he advanced several conceptual and theoretical arguments to support his opinion. This paper focuses on the opinion of Pal concerning non-retroactivity of law, global democracy, imperialism, and victor's justice. The paper analyses his opinion in the light of contemporary developments and argues that his criticisms of the international criminal law regime and global justice are still relevant.

The International Court of Justice [ICJ] delivered its Judgment on Jadhav (India v. Pakistan) in 2019, finding Pakistan in breach of its obligations under Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963. Thus, Pakistan is under a continuing obligation to provide, through the means of its own choosing, effective review and reconsideration [ERR] of Jadhav's conviction and sentence. This paper comments on the ICJ's Jadhav Judgment and its implications for Pakistan and India. It also evaluates the legal option if India is not satisfied with Pakistan's implementation of the ERR process effectively. In this situation, India can approach the ICJ again. This paper finds that the possibilities of India's request to be admissible before the ICJ under Article 60 of its Statute are relatively higher than the possibilities of its successful adjudication on the merits.

The adoption of the Rome Statute is a significant moment for international criminal law. Before its formulation, the criminal law was governed by the sources mentioned in their statute or Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice [ICJ Statute]. Custom is one of the important sources within the ICJ Statute. The ad hoc tribunals applied custom and even formulated certain customs. The formulation of custom is considered as against the principle of legality. To avoid such criticism, the State Parties inserted Article 21 in the Rome Statute. The provision clarifies the law which the court can apply. The parties chose not to include custom explicitly. However, the wordings of the provision indicate that the custom is still a source for the court. Apart from the wording of Article 21, other provisions of the Statute give ample scope for the application of custom.

At the second Belt and Road forum in 2019, the Chinese government set out its intentions to develop a “Green Belt and Road”. This paper will examine critical issues arising from green-financed projects under the Belt and Road. In particular, the root issue of the lack of harmonized sustainability standards for green bonds globally. While there are positive regulatory developments, there is still a big gap between companies’ reporting metrics and investors’ growing expectations of what constitutes “green”—constituting “green washing”. This issue compounds as green projects under the Belt and Road are often complex infrastructure projects, where unexpected (and negative) externalities may sometimes occur on the ground. In this regard, this paper advocates for robust risk management, where accurate forecasting of environmental harm and stakeholder engagement are implemented actively throughout the project's life cycle. Finally, adequate dispute resolution and avoidance measures should be adopted to protect stakeholders.

The distinction between disputes of sea boundary delimitation and disputes over the existence of maritime entitlements was one key element of the legal argument that the Philippines brought forward against China in the Philippines v. China Arbitration. On the one hand, the distinction between delimitation and entitlement allowed the Tribunal to establish its jurisdiction on several Philippine submissions despite the jurisdictional exclusions of China's declaration under Article 298(1)(a)(i) of the Law of the Sea Convention. On the other hand, the Tribunal's finding about the lack of China's entitlements has important consequences. China and a number of lawyers objected to the jurisdictional separability of entitlement and delimitation. The aim of this paper is to discuss the question of whether a tribunal can establish jurisdiction on the existence of maritime entitlements in a context where jurisdiction on boundary delimitation is excluded and where a determination of entitlements has consequences for boundary delimitation.

For any foreign investor, protection of their investment is a primary concern in host states. National legislations and BITs usually provide legal security to them so that they can exercise their desired economic freedom in host countries. Without legal safeguards for their investments, they will not be motivated to invest their capital further. Like other host states, generally, the national laws and BITs of Bangladesh provide significant investment protection guarantees. This paper will discuss how far the protection through judicial or arbitral settlement is established in the legal framework and BITs of Bangladesh. Dispute settlement mechanisms in Bangladesh, various ICSID cases involving Bangladesh, and conflicts between Bangladesh and foreign investors are discussed. The paper also covers the issues and challenges of judicial arrangements in Bangladesh, and findings show that dispute settlement arrangements in Bangladesh are not up to international standards and require significant development. Last, recommendations are provided for consideration.

The Adamakopoulos and Others v. Cyprus Decision is noteworthy because it provides a blueprint for mass claims proceedings in investment treaty arbitration, justifying the possibility of addressing investment claims en masse in the future. This case comment reviews the background to the dispute, addresses the majority decision on the mass claims, and comments on the Tribunal's reasoning regarding the non-requirement of additional consent to mass claims arbitration, the homogeneity of the claims, and procedural flexibility.

This paper explores the legality of the land closure imposed upon the Gaza Strip by Israel. After having considered the area under occupation, the paper argues that the legality of the closure must be determined under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, the principle of self-determination of peoples, and the Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In the light of these rules, the arbitrary closure of the Gaza Strip should be considered illegal because it breaches the unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and because it violates the freedom of movement of the local population. Moreover, the closure breaches the relevant rules pertaining to the transit of goods in occupied territory. The paper concludes that most of the violations caused by the closure affect peremptory rules which produce obligations erga omnes, so that any state in the international community is entitled to react under the law of state responsibility.

This paper examines the use of a specific international legal fiction. It is claimed that a legal fiction was confirmed by the Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration (2016). The paper asks whether this is an effective legal fiction. The paper will argue that this is not so, pointing to the difficulties that the fiction necessarily creates. From this example, lessons may be learned of the phenomenon of legal fictions of international law generally, and, crucially, of their effectiveness.

This paper considers the international legal implications of certain civil lawsuits that recently resulted in Japanese companies being ordered to pay compensation to Korean victims of forced labour, focusing specifically on whether investor-state arbitration could provide a means of redress against judgments affecting those companies. After identifying the jurisdictional hurdles that those companies might face were they to challenge those judgments before an Arbitral Tribunal, this paper explores the most relevant treaty protection disciplines that could be relied upon in bringing such challenges, and discusses the remedies that a competent Arbitral Tribunal could prescribe were it to find that those judgments were not in conformity with Korea's international obligations. Building on existing jurisprudence, this paper shows that investment arbitration may provide a means for offsetting the adverse consequences of Korean forced labour litigation, but also highlights a number of difficulties that the Japanese companies would face in pursuing such an avenue.

Access to and from the sea for landlocked states has been a long-standing issue in the law of the sea. Such issue is also addressed by the Convention on the Legal Status of the Caspian Sea (or Aktau Convention), which foresees a right of free access to other seas for landlocked State Parties—Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan—through the Russian Federation. At the same time, it upholds the transit state's sovereignty and right to protect its legitimate interests. Consequently, it is important to assess the limits of the transit state's discretion pursuant to the Aktau Convention. In this regard, that instrument has important linkages with UNCLOS and with general international law. These linkages introduce in the Aktau Convention various norms—such as due regard and reasonableness—that play an important role in its interpretation.

Even before Bangladesh's submission on the outer limits of its continental shelf beyond 200 miles from its baseline reaches the head of the queue awaiting the attention of the Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, the maritime boundary delimitations with Myanmar (2012) and India (2014) have produced a unique situation, in which Bangladesh's seabed boundaries have been fully delimited with both neighbours, creating a single continuous outer limit landward of the one submitted to the Commission. This may mean that there is no need to await the Commission's reaction to Bangladesh's submission, as there is nothing to stop Bangladesh simply beginning to exploit areas on its side of the two boundaries. This paper examines whether the position is really that simple, and whether any other state might have grounds for objecting if Bangladesh does so, together with deficits of co-operation that may confound early moves to exploitation.

Upon the 2014 State of Palestine's accession to Geneva Convention III, captured Palestinians who took part in belligerent acts against the occupier should be treated as prisoners of war due to the fact that they belong to a party to an armed conflict. These individuals fall under three categories: members of security forces, affiliates of armed resistance groups, and uprisers who fight the occupant spontaneously on an individual basis. Contrary to established rules of IHL, Israel does not make any distinction regarding the status of these three types. Unilateral Israeli treatment of its captives does not hold water under international law. Such actions may trigger liability based on international criminal law, particularly as the ICC decided in 2021 that it possesses jurisdiction to investigate crimes occurring in the territory of Palestine. The mere fact of confining prisoners of war after the cessation of hostilities may constitute a ground for criminal prosecution.

The development of uncrewed maritime vehicles [UMVs] has the potential to increase the scale of military maritime surveillance in the exclusive economic zones of foreign coastal states. This paper considers the legal implications of the expanded use of UMVs for this purpose. It shows how features of the legal regime—namely how its application depends on determining the intent of a vessel's operation (to distinguish marine scientific research from military surveillance), as well the obligation to have due regard—have a “dynamic” quality that will pose a challenge to UMVs operated by autonomous technology. The legal obligations will require equipping UMVs with the capacity to communicate something about their identity, the purpose of their mission, and to be able to have some capacity to be responsive to the economic and environmental interests of the coastal state.

Using Michel Foucault's concept of modes of objectification, this paper argues that treaties, declarations, and agreements constitute international juridical forms that transform human beings into legal subjects. It retraces the objectification of “natives” in nineteenth-century colonial treaties that made human beings accessories to territories and transformed them into colonial subjects. This legal construct, the paper contends, was rendered unstable in the UN era when treaties re-objectified the “natives” into “peoples”, thereby allowing colonial subjects to re-subjectify themselves into actors and re-describe themselves with an adjective, a nationality. The paper then brings the history to the twenty-first century and posits that ASEAN is now objectifying new trans-national subjects that are ontologically connected to the regional economy. This history of legal subjectivity reveals not only the power of international juridical forms as a mode of objectification, but also the trajectory of subject formation in Southeast Asia under the ASEAN Charter.

Mainstream international law is Eurocentric. Throughout the past half millennia, no territory beyond Europe was safe from jus gentium's striking capability to legitimize the intrusion of European civilizational precepts. Beginning with the Americas but quickly shifting to Africa and Asia, each continent was a battleground for the penetration of a provincial knowledge system. In this paper, I explore the implications of Eurocentrism for international legal pedagogy. While textbook authors now pay homage to other civilizations, their effusions are ornamental only. Instead of supporting epistemological equivalency, they centre European international law throughout their works, exorcising the brutalities of European history that generated the law in question. After setting out the dilemma, I outline three approaches towards transforming international legal pedagogy that capitalize on the decolonization movement. Each method builds on the premise that, without epistemic diversity, legal pedagogy will continue to rationalize European international law's predatory impulse.

Despite the Qing Empire's formal inclusion as a member of the Eurocentric community of states by the turn of the 20th century, its lack of full sovereign status was frequently reasserted in practice. This included proceedings where legal norms were unilaterally applied to it as an object of regulation, provoking a pursuit of agency. In particular, the unprecedented foreign occupation and administration of China after the Boxer crisis of 1899–1901 spurred efforts in pedagogy, legal reform, and diplomacy. Several such efforts subsequently overlapped at the Second Hague Conference in 1907. There, Qing diplomats for the first time influenced multilateral negotiations, and discovered a nascent solidarity with other “weak” states in Latin America and Asia. Joint struggle against great power initiatives sparked new conversations about the equality of states, however, major questions about the implications of sovereign status for genuine agency, and the contingent forms of international legal “progress,” remained unresolved.

As the damage caused by COVID-19 has increased exponentially, so too has the insistence that China bears some international responsibility for the unquantifiable damage sustained as a direct result of the state having failed to contain the virus, and to notify the international community of its existence. Some have suggested that the international contagion of the virus may be classified as transboundary harm. The current article analyses the law of transboundary harm, and proposes a set of criteria based on treaty and precedent that may be relied on to properly classify an event as such. It concludes that it is not only incorrect to classify international contagion as transboundary harm, but that to do so would pose a significant risk to the position and treatment of the individual in international law.