Search: Symposium on the Functional Approach to the Law of Occupation
20 May The Unredeemable Republic of China: Why Professor Lung-Chu Chen’s Theory of Effective Self-Determination May Be Harmful to Taiwan’s Statehood Claim
[Dr Ming-Sung Kuo is an associate professor of law at University of Warwick (UK) where he has taught international law, constitutional and administrative law, and legal theory. He earned his JSD and LLM from Yale University and his LLB and another master degree from National Taiwan University.] In Professor Lung-Chu Chen’s recent post on Opinio Juris, he reiterates his justification of Taiwan’s statehood, which I first heard when I was still a senior law student at National Taiwan University. In this brief note, I aim to point out why Professor...
05 May Symposium on the UNWCC: War Crimes Against Culture – Poland’s Charge File Submissions to the UNWCC
legal measures that could be taken to hold those responsible to account, informed debates at the United Nations War Crimes Commission, founded in October 1943. Representatives of the Polish War Crimes Office (created in November 1943) were cognisant of the pre-UNWCC discussions about war crimes, which had taken place in a range of unofficial fora, and had taken part in the Polish Government’s deliberations in 1942 and early 1943 on the draft Polish law relating to war crimes. That law, the ‘Decree of the President of the Republic of Poland...16 Jul On (Neo)Colonial Genocide
...the need to abandon views that “reduc[e] the history of international law to a Völkerrechtsgeschichte der Opfer” – a History of international law of victims. “Postcolonial scholarship”, he argues, “usually places the South American legal space as part of the history of the abusers”. According to him, “nineteenth-century South American republics are studied with respect to the topic of the ‘unequal treaties’ that were forced on them by imperial powers under the legitimation of the ‘standard of civilization’, with international law appearing mainly as Medium der Befreiung in a decolonization...21 Jun Makdisi on the Language of Israel and Palestine
who are practicing colonialism and apartheid in the Palestinian territories, as the findings of a recent report by The Human Sciences Research Council of South Africa (HSRC) make clear, summarized here by Valentina Azarov of the International Law Observer: The HSRC commissioned an international team of scholars and practitioners of international public law from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Israel and the West Bank to conduct the study. The resulting 300-page draft, titled ‘Occupation, Colonialism, Apartheid?: A re-assessment of Israel’s practices in the occupied Palestinian territories under international law’, represents...
26 Oct The Special Tribunal for Lebanon: After the Judgment in Ayyash et al., Justice at Last?
...deals with the competence and applicable law of international tribunals. Similar to the above-mentioned approach of the Tribunal in analyzing customary law, the judges further identified a formation of custom in international law with regard to the determination of tribunals’ own jurisdiction (competence de la competence/ Kompetenz-Kompetenz [para 43 of the decision]). Though scholars like Milanovic disagreed with this decision, it served as a fruitful input in the discussion regarding the inherent powers of international tribunals. Accordingly, even if the judgment of the STL does not seem likely to settle...
19 Nov The Identification of the EU as a New Kind of International Organisation
16 February 2022 concerning the conditionality mechanism and the rule of law. The Court establishes that the member states have first agreed on their common values and subsequently applied these values to their organisation. This legal observation not only strokes with the historical development of the EU from a union of democratic states to a European democracy but also embodies an entirely new conceptual approach to the process of international cooperation between States. It refutes the Westphalian assumption that the EU should either become a state or an organisation of...