In association with the International Commission of Jurists

Symposia

15 Jul

[Patricia Tarre Moser is an Attorney at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights. The views expressed here are her own.] The international law doctrine of sovereign immunity has proved to be a powerful obstacle to effective enforcement of international human rights.  Domestic and international courts have begun to carve out some exceptions to sovereign immunity in individual cases, but as the ICJ made clear in the Ferrini case, sovereign immunity continues to protect states from civil proceedings -- even in cases where jus cogens violations take place. But what if a state, as a counter-measure, withheld sovereign immunity from another state that engages in a jus cogens violation?  In a recent article I propose that, in certain circumstances, for example a civil case brought in a State A for torture violations in State B, State A's courts should be permitted to withhold sovereign immunity from State B as a form of countermeasure against State B. The objective of the countermeasure must be to persuade the wrong-doing State to cease the violation and/or make reparations. The non-recognition of state immunity as a countermeasure could contribute towards this goal. Even if the hypothetical national court’s orders cannot be enforced against the wrong-doing State due to immunity from enforcement measures, the judgment itself serves as reparation to the victims. Using torture as an example, my proposal works as follows: after the torture victim files a claim against the State B before a Court of State A, the latter has to undertake a prima facie analysis of whether the alleged victim was subjected to torture and whether the torture was attributable to State B. If so, State A’s Court has to determine whether the non-recognition of State B’s immunity would be proportionate to the injury and to the gravity of the violation that caused the injury.  Additionally, while assessing the proportionality of the measure, the Court would need to take into account the rights of all parties involved: the victim, the State A and State B.
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12 Jul

[Otto Spijkers is Assistant Professor of Public International Law at Utrecht University and Arron Honniball is a Student of the LL.M. Public International Law at Utrecht University] As the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) approach their target date of 2015, the international community has begun developing post-2015 goals; the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). A number of concurrent work streams were established, including the High-Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda (HLP). It was emphasised throughout the resulting report of the HLP and at the launch event on May 30, 2013 that various global public consultations shaped that report and will continue to shape the SDGs development process. In this post we wish to assess whether there is a meaningful opportunity for global public participation in the formulation of the SDGs. Are citizens, individually or organized, provided with an opportunity to influence the development, implementation and/or evaluation of the SDGs? For international lawyers and political scientists, it is especially interesting to look at this “experiment” in global public participation. Are we witnessing the start of a new process of global policy-making, with global public consultation as one of its principal steps? Such process would proceed roughly as follows: First the UN conducts a global public consultation; then a group of experts use the results of the consultation as the basis for a comprehensive report, and this report is then the basis of a UN-led negotiation process, which will ultimately lead to commitments accepted by the community of States.
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11 Jul

[Scott Robinson is a recent J.D. graduate from the University of Western Ontario, Faculty of Law] In at least seventy-six states it remains illegal to engage in same-sex conduct; in at least five of these, it still attracts the death penalty. It is no secret that, at the hands of both state actors and private individuals, LGBTQ persons around the world continue to face widespread and often systematic discrimination on account of their sexual orientation and gender identity. Further, nowhere within international human rights law is sexual orientation or gender identity explicitly codified as prohibited grounds for discrimination. While “great weight” should be ascribed to the views of human rights treaty bodies that have read-in protection over the years, such views remain but non-binding recommendations directed at states, tied to existing treaties silent on LGBTQ rights. Indeed, it is clear that international law is utterly failing to address “one of the great neglected human rights challenges of our time”. A robust, comprehensive LGBTQ treaty is needed—perhaps a “Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against LGBTQ Persons”. Treaty-precedents like the CERD and CEDAW (especially when viewed in light of more recent human rights treaties), demonstrate that an LGBTQ non-discrimination treaty is possible in form. Documents like the Yogyakarta Principles, certainly demonstrate that a pointed LGBTQ treaty is possible in substance. The real question, however, is how to achieve a treaty anytime in the near future, given the fierce resistance to LGBTQ rights witnessed to date, particularly within the UN system. There exists no General Assembly Resolution or Declaration on LBGTQ persons, nor is one likely any time soon (any purported attempts at such having essentially been abandoned in the past). Perhaps more formidably, actors such as the Holy See and Islamic and African blocs of states have balked at the very notion of LGBTQ rights at every possible opportunity at the UN—events at the Human Rights Council as recently as a few weeks ago stand as a testament to this continued opposition. At this point in time, it seems as though the only viable option for achieving an LGBTQ treaty is by engaging in what has become known as the “Ottawa Process” for treaty negotiation and adoption.
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10 Jul

[Reuven (Ruvi) Ziegler is a lecturer in law at the University of Reading School of Law.] The European Court of Human Rights has consistently held that the undertaking in Article 3 of Protocol I of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)  to hold ‘free elections’ which ‘will ensure the free expression of the opinion of the people in the choice of the legislature’ entails an individual right to vote (see e.g. in Hirst (no .2). [57]). While the Strasbourg court pronounced that ‘the presumption in a democratic state must be in favour of inclusion’ and that ‘any departure from the principle of universal suffrage risks undermining the democratic validity of the legislature thus elected and the laws it promulgates’ (Hirst (no .2), [59]), the court has hitherto failed to develop a principled approach regarding the circumstances in which such ‘departure’ may be justified. Instead, it has emphasised that ‘[a]s regards, in particular, the choice of electoral system, the Court reiterates that the Contracting States enjoy a wide margin of appreciation in this sphere’ (Sitaropoulos, [65-66]), as ‘[t]here are numerous ways of organising and running electoral systems’ (Id; also Shindler, [102]). The margin of appreciation doctrine has received both scorn and praise. This post does not concern its general application; rather, it is contended that the court’s voting rights jurisprudence has conflated questions relating to choice of electoral systems (‘First-Past-The-Post’, Alternative Vote, Proportional Representation, Single Transferrable Vote, and the like) with questions relating to voting eligibility. Even if states should enjoy a margin of appreciation which takes into account the ‘historical development, cultural diversity and political thought within Europe’ (Hirst (no .2), [61]) when their choice of system of government is appraised, according states a ‘wide [but] not all-embracing’ (Hirst (no .2), [82]) margin of appreciation in determining voting eligibility detrimentally affects fundamental democratic rights of individual Europeans, as Strasbourg’s jurisprudence concerning voting rights of non-resident citizens (expatriates) exhibits. All democratic states set eligibility criteria for elections of their institutions of government. Alongside the ubiquitous exclusion of non-citizen residents (at least from) national elections of their state of residence, some states - including members of the Council of Europe - impose residency requirements which disqualify expatriates during (part or all) of their period of absence. Consequently, otherwise eligible citizens of one member state of the Council of Europe residing in another member state can be excluded from elections of their state of citizenship and from elections of their state of residence.
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09 Jul

[Maninder Malli recently completed a LL.M. (International Legal Studies) at New York University and he is currently working with the Legal Vice Presidency of the World Bank in Washington, D.C.] International investment law (IIL) is highly dynamic.  The lack of a broad multilateral agreement on investment coupled with the rapid rise of foreign direct investment (FDI) has led to the profusion of bilateral investment treaties (BITs) and, increasingly, minilateral arrangements between three or more geographically-proximate or otherwise like-minded States.  The ‘spaghetti bowl’ of international investment agreements is becoming further entangled with hundreds of minilateral arrangements, including free trade agreements (FTAs) with investment provisions, economic partnership agreements and regional agreements. In many areas of international law, including international trade, States are abandoning glacial multilateral initiatives and opting for regional or sectoral approaches to solve global problems and coordinate mutually beneficial action.  Moses Naím suggests that the failure since the 1990s of most grand multilateral negotiations represents not only a perpetual lack of international consensus, but also a “flawed obsession with multilateralism as the panacea for all the world’s ills.”  Naím argues for a smarter, more targeted approach, by bringing to the relevant table “the smallest number of countries needed to have the largest possible impact on solving a particular problem.”  Francis Fukuyama, similarly, has advocated for “multi-multilateralism,” entailing a diversity of institutions and institutional forms to provide governance across a range of security, economic, environmental, and other issues. In the context of IIL, the profusion of regional investment arrangements (such as the recent trilateral investment agreement between China, Japan and South Korea and the Mexico–Central America FTA) and the ongoing discussions for investment regulation in a Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) and a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP) are clear evidence of this minilateral trend.  As proposed in the TPP and TTIP, investment regulation is incorporated into broader economic arrangements which often include trade, intellectual property and regulatory coherence.  The Energy Charter Treaty (ECT) is a sectoral example of a minilateral treaty which entails investor protection.  States are clearly converting their strong bilateral economic and political relationships into minilateral arrangements to regulate FDI. These initiatives, at least in part, reflect a desire of State parties to circumvent broader multilateral efforts that lack consensus on the precise standards of treatment of foreign investors and thus fail to achieve substantive common ground.  The OECD’s failed Multilateral Agreement on Investment in the late 1990s and the inability to advance the multilateral investment agenda within the World Trade Organization illustrate the challenge of crafting comprehensive general principles and specific treaty provisions which are responsive to the diverse and vacillating economic, social and political conditions of a large number of States.  In the IIL context, this is most clearly manifested in the dichotomy between (i) the desire of States to attract FDI and to be perceived as active participants in the liberal economic order, on one hand, and (ii) the need to retain regulatory flexibility and avoid plethoric investor-state arbitration, on the other.  The absence of complete and adequate multilateral investment rules was historically blamed on the discord between capital-supplying and capital-receiving nations.  This dichotomy is today no longer as simple, as an increasing number of countries are both capital suppliers and capital recipients, and the correlation between the two is ever-fluctuating. I submit that greater attention should be paid to the potential for minilateral arrangements to better reflect modern State desires and ambitions for reciprocal FDI promotion and protection.  While the content of most investment agreements is remarkably similar, there are important deviations in the wording, application and interpretation of many substantive provisions. 
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08 Jul

[Christopher Warren is an Assistant Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University] Disciplinarily, as my title suggests, I come from elsewhere.  But having travelled here to the shores of international law from my home in early modern cultural studies, I come in part to praise the fragmented landscape. “Fragmentation” in recent legal discussions usually refers to “traditional international law [being] pushed aside by a mosaic of particular rules and institutions, each following its embedded preferences.” “An everyday international occurrence such as the transport of hazardous chemicals at sea,” as Martti Koskenniemi explains, can now be “narrate[d] as part of a different set of human pursuits, values, and priorities,” including trade law, transport law, environmental law, law of the sea, or human rights. Koskenniemi’s account of jurisdictional and normative fragmentation usefully captures two main insights, first, that narrative—story—plays a critical and maybe increasing role on what is notably called the “international stage”; and secondly, that the stories we tell and the ways that we tell them have legal, social, economic, and political consequences. Robert Cover’s foundational essay “Nomos and Narrative” (pdf) powerfully articulates such insights as well.

Disciplinary Fragmentation

My first interest here, however, is not normative fragmentation but a different though related kind of fragmentation, namely disciplinary fragmentation, specifically the present disconnect between international law and humanistic disciplines like literature and history. Fortunately, disciplinary fragmentation has left rough, jagged edges, and while I’m visiting here I want to take the opportunity to celebrate the craggy coastlines where we can still find evidence of international law’s connections with the humanities. The present distance between international law and literary and cultural studies might make my participation in this forum surprising, but it’s also, I’d suggest, a fruitful way to think historically and methodologically about international law.
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08 Jul

It's been a few months in the making, but today we're kicking off our inaugural Emerging Voices symposium. Until late August, we'll bring you a wide variety of posts, all written by graduate students, junior practitioners and junior academics. So watch this space if you want to read more about international law's often forgotten connections with the humanities, expat voting rights under...

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27 Jun

[Katerina Linos is an Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law] I am very pleased that Pierre Verdier, Harlan Cohen, and Roger Alford are offering the closing comments in the symposium on The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion.  Of Pierre Verdier’s multiple contributions to the study of international networks and international economic law, I’ll single out his article “Transnational Regulatory Networks and their Limits,” as it is especially relevant to today’s discussion. In this piece, Pierre Verdier argues that Transnational Regulatory Networks may be ill-equipped to deal with the distributional conflict and defection risks that so often plague transnational cooperation. Harlan Cohen has written extensively about legal theory, legal history, constructivism, and fragmentation in international law. I’ll highlight his recent article “Finding International Law, Part II: Our Fragmenting Legal Community” as it contains the provocative claim that distinct legal communities are forming and creating deeply conflicting interpretations of international lawmaking. Among Roger Alford’s many contributions to international and comparative law, his article “Misusing International Sources to Interpret the Constitution” is particularly relevant today’s discussion, because of its fascinating analysis of the different actors who use foreign models to strengthen their arguments. These scholars’ posts raise three major questions:
  • Can diffusion through democracy help solve issues like global warming, issues that involve significant externalities and interdependencies?
  • What are the risks of diffusion through democracy?
  • Can we compare judicial borrowing to legislative borrowing? And how does all this connect to yesterday’s decisions on same-sex marriage?
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27 Jun

I commend Katerina Linos’ book to our readers and echo the many positive comments that others in this book symposium have shared. Her theory of bottom-up democratic diffusion of norms addresses many of the concerns that have been voiced regarding the democracy deficit that occurs when policy elites borrow from abroad. I want to push Katerina a bit on the...

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27 Jun

[Harlan Cohen is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Georgia School of Law] As others have already written, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion, is an extraordinary achievement.  Katerina Linos has succeeded in writing a book that is both bold and meticulous, counterintuitive and utterly convincing.  Reading the book, one feels a sense of excitement that we’re truly learning something new.  There is much to learn from it (among others things, the value of her multi-method approach – a model for others), and it is certain to move the conversation in a variety of fields. Others have already discussed the rich substance of Linos’ study.  My thoughts and questions are on Linos’ conclusions and implications, both those in the chapter of the same title (Chapter 8) and those left unstated. My main concern is that Linos’ study may be more consequential than the final chapter suggests.  It might just be that she’s too humble, but I’m not sure Linos’ conclusion chapter does justice to the radical implications of her findings.  Take the first set of implications she identifies, those regarding the legitimacy of policy diffusion.  “The good news,” as David Zaring summarized, is that far from being imposed by unaccountable foreigners or technocrats, health and family policies are borrowed from abroad as a result of democratic politics.  As Linos writes on p. 181, “[b]y connecting references to foreign laws and international organization proposals to majoritarian values, this theory offers a direct response to criticisms of foreign laws and international organizations’ recommendations as undemocratic.” As Linos recognizes, diffusion through democracy comes with concerns of its own.  Because politicians draw only upon those models to which voters are likely to respond – models from nearby and wealthy states – the policies adopted may not be the best available for their state.  Linos suggests that the foreign models they borrow from may be good choices; various theories of optimal borrowing suggest that shared legal heritage and success on the ground are positive indicia of good policy fit.  But whether or not these policies are the best, the overall implication is that, suggested by politicians and ratified by voters, these policies are at least legitimate (or better, more legitimate than critics of borrowing recognize.) I’m less sure. 
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27 Jun

[Pierre-Hugues Verdier is an Associate Professor of Law at the University of Virginia School of Law] Katerina Linos’s new book, The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion, is one of the most important contributions to arise from the recent turn to empirical scholarship in international law and international relations.  Instead of following a deductive path from broad theoretical assumptions, the book carefully combines survey evidence, cross-country regression analysis and case studies to paint a coherent picture of policy diffusion through democracy in the fields of health and family policy.  Yet, this careful and inductive approach leads to a central theoretical contribution to the field.  From a descriptive perspective, the book shows that non-binding standards with minimal institutional support can contribute to significant domestic policy shifts in high-stakes areas, despite resistance by domestic interest groups.  From a normative perspective, its model of diffusion through democracy may solve a perennial and vexing paradox of global governance, by providing international policy coordination that is both effective and consistent with democratic accountability. However, while the book’s focus on the often neglected areas of health and family policy is innovative and welcome, it inevitably raises the question whether the mechanism it identifies applies to other areas of international law and policy coordination. As the book points out, the field of social policy is characterized by non-binding international models rather than binding agreements, with a few exceptions such as ILO conventions.  Nevertheless, the book suggests in several places that diffusion through democracy may apply much more broadly to other policy choices, and can inform longstanding general questions of institutional design such as the choice of hard law or soft law instruments.  Likewise, the book’s conclusion implies that the normative benefits of this mechanism in alleviating the democratic deficit of global governance also apply to other areas of international policymaking.  In this short contribution, I want to suggest two reasons for caution is assessing the broader potential implications of this mechanism.
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26 Jun

[Katerina Linos is an Assistant Professor of Law at Berkeley Law] I am thrilled to receive comments from Anu Bradford and Rachel Brewster on The Democratic Foundations of Policy Diffusion! Anu Bradford’s contributions to European Union law, trade law, anti-trust law, and international regime theory are multiple and major, but I highlight her recent piece “The Brussels Effect,” as it connects well to today’s discussion. In “The Brussels Effect,” Bradford explains clearly why some jurisdictions are able to directly influence the choices of foreign firms and citizens through their market power while others are not. Rachel Brewster’s work on international legal theory, state reputation, trade law and climate change has greatly influenced my thinking. Her article “Stepping Stone or Stumbling Block: Incrementalism in National Climate Change Regulation” proposes fascinating and counter-intuitive interactions between national and international regulatory choices. I focus my response on two questions raised by both scholars:
  • Do popular laws spread in different ways from unpopular ones? What changes when international organizations do not recommend expansions to social programs, but instead call for austerity measures and cut-backs?
  • Does diffusion through democracy lead us to expect global convergence or regional silos?
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