In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Author: Jan Klabbers

20 Aug

[Jan Klabbers is the Deputy Director of the Erik Castren Institute of International Law and Human Rights.] Almost all governments are almost always engaged in rewriting almost all of the national histories of their states. What should come as an unpleasant surprise though is that Cambridge University Press proves to be a willing accomplice. The Guardian reported last Saturday that CUP...

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25 Jul

[Jan Klabbers is Professor of International Organisations Law and Director of the Centre of Excellence in Global Governance Research at the University of Helsinki.] Much of the more serious theoretical reflection in international law aims to bring apology and utopia in alignment. This may be structurally impossible, as Martti Koskenniemi suggested a quarter of a century ago, but aiming to bridge the gap between the two is nonetheless a laudable enterprise. Eyal Benvenisti’s recent contribution to the American Journal of International Law comes closer than many before him. Partly this is because, unlike many others, Benvenisti takes both apology and utopia seriously: he is realist and idealist rolled into one. For him, sovereignty is not a bad word but a respectable concept, providing the space for legitimate exercises of self-determination. At the same time, he is aware that with globalization, many sovereign states (as traditionally conceived) are no longer able fully to help and protect their citizens. Globalization erodes independence and thus undermines self-determination – hence, sovereignty needs to be reconceived in order to take non-citizens into account and, what is more, is indeed undergoing such a re-conceptualization in positive international law. Benvenisti has written an excellent piece, in his customary lucid and thoughtful style. The paper contributes to global ethics in a fairly novel way by positing a combination of cosmopolitanism and parochialism that seems reasonable and workable; it therewith adds to other recent studies engaged in similar enterprises, albeit from different angles (think of Kok-Chor Tan’s Justice without Borders, or Toni Erskine’s Embedded Cosmopolitanism). It contributes to international law by demonstrating that international law as it currently stands can indeed be seen to offer support to such a novel re-conceptualization of sovereignty as trusteeship. I have only one major gripe with the article, and that is that it is too short. It is too short in two ways: it neither allows for the argument completely to unfold, nor does it allow for the empirical materials to be carefully discussed. These are both obviously restrictions stemming from the format of a journal article, so perhaps the thing to question is the popularity (well-nigh sanctity) of the format, or the link between medium and message: the medium dictates the message. My first gripe relates to the space needed for normative argument.
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28 Jan

For those of us living in the US, it is sometimes difficult to realize that interesting international legal events may also occur elsewhere; for instance, in the UK. Yet, times in the UK are very interesting indeed. This week alone the newspapers were filled with reports on the questioning of senior UK Foreign Office lawyers concerning the legality of the...

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27 Jan

This morning I had the distinct displeasure of being woken up by a phone call coming in on my Finnish cell phone, around 6 a.m. The caller turned out to be a Helsinki-based energy company, which started to promise me all sorts of cheap energy until I pointed out that I was currently residing in New York, that it was...

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22 Jan

Over the last few days I learned a valuable lesson: irony and satire do not work. I thought my contribution on soft statehood was written with my tongue so far in my cheek that it risked coming out of my ear; I thought I had piled on the layers of irony so richly that had my contribution been a pastry,...

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20 Jan

It would be tempting to join Opinio Juris' discussion on soft law of a few weeks ago, but having written quite a bit on the topic going back to the mid-1990s, I thought I'd pay some attention to a lovely little story that ran in the New York Times about a month or two ago (I forgot to date my clipping...

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03 Mar

I am actually not sure whether it makes much sense, as Isabelle fleetingly suggests, to think of articles 31-32 in terms of either rules or principles. Following e.g. Rosenne, I tend to think that they lack any 'norm-creative character' (to use the phrase from the ICJ's 1969 North Sea Continental Shelf cases), and are best seen as methodological devices: as instructions...

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02 Mar

I would agree with Richard (and Isabelle) that not too much should be expected from any rules on interpretation. Interpretation is, so to speak, not entirely a rule-governed activity, in much the same way as playing the violin or the piano is not entirely rule-governed. Or building do-it-yourself bookshelves by following the manual, for that matter. I might be particularly...

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