LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: The lecture attempts to look at some important concepts and landmarks in international law and analyse how they have been impacted by developments in the field of women and children's rights. The sources of international law, sovereignty, state responsibility, human rights and the status of non state actors have all been transformed by issues concerning women and children. These developments have created a more intrusive international law framework while highlighting universal global values. The lecture will also look at the some of the critiques of this new approach to international law while looking to the future to see how these issues will unfold. Welcome by Dr Ivan BerkowitzChaired by Professor Eyal BenvenistiRadhika Coomaraswamy received her BA from Yale University, her J.D. from Columbia University and her LLM from Harvard University. In Sri Lanka, she was Director of International Centre for Ethnic Studies from 1982 to 2005 and the Chairperson of the Sri Lankan Human Rights Commission from 2003 to 2006. Recently, from 2015-2018, she was a member of the Constitutional Council.Internationally, Radhika Coomaraswamy served as UN Under Secretary General and as Special Representative of the Secretary General on Children and Armed Conflict from 2006 until her retirement in 2012.Earlier, from 1994 to 2003, she was the UN Special Rapporteur on Violence against Women, an independent expert attached to the UN Human Rights Commission in Geneva.In 2014, the UN Secretary General asked Radhika Coomaraswamy to lead the Global Study to review the fifteen year implementation of Security Council Resolution 1325 on Women, Peace and Security.In 2017 she was appointed to the UN Fact Finding Mission on Myanmar and also appointed as a member of The Secretary General’s Board of Advisors on Mediation.She was been privileged to be asked to deliver the Grotius Lecture of the American Association of International Law in 2013 and has received numerous honorary degrees and honors.These lectures are kindly supported by Dr and Mrs Ivan Berkowitz who are Friends of the Centre.

A series of conversations on international legal scholarship, political engagement and the transformative potential of academia. Each conversation will be chaired by Francisco José Quintana and Marina Veličković and will centre around a theme, concept or a method and their relationship to political movements, struggles and margins from which they have emerged and within (and for) which they have emancipatory potential.The conversation will focus on the role that critical approaches to international law have played and should play in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic. We will look beyond the dominant disciplinary responses to COVID-19 and explore if and how international law can be employed strategically in this context. The relationship between international law and political economy will serve as our starting point, and from there we will explore the potential of international law to be used as a tool of politics of resistance and transformation. We will also discuss challenges and responsibilities of teaching international law at a time of crisis. Marina and Francisco will lead the conversation for ~45 minutes after which they will pass the responsibility on to the audience. This session will be hosted online via Zoom Webinar. Pre-registration is required and, in order to preserve the intimacy and informality that define the series, places are limited. Priority will be given to LCIL fellows and Cambridge students.Speakers:Ntina Tzouvala is an ARC Laureate Postdoctoral Fellow in International Law at Melbourne Law School. Her work focuses on the history and theory of international law, with a particular emphasis on international law and global capitalism. Her first monograph, Capitalism as Civilisation: A History of International Law, will be published by Cambridge University Press in late 2020.Robert Knox is a Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Liverpool and an Editor of Historical Materialism and The London Review of International Law. He works primarily in the Marxist and critical legal traditions. His research touches on the relationship between international law, capitalism and imperialism (with a particular focus on questions of racialisation), on law’s key role in the birth and consolidation of neoliberalism and on the relationship between law and social change.

Lecture summary: Over the last two years the court has faced a series of unprecedented challenges. We have seen a run of acquittals, case collapses, and greater and lesser scandals involving judges and the Office of the Prosecutor. While the Court has been buoyed by a number of significant convictions of rebellion leaders, momentum for an inquiry into the Court’s functioning and serious reform is gathering in the Assembly of States Parties. How has it come to this and what are the options going forward? Dr Douglas Guilfoyle is Associate Professor of International and Security Law and a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade Visiting Legal Fellow (2019-2020). He publishes largely in the fields of law of the sea and maritime operations, international and transnational criminal law and history of international law. His publications include Shipping Interdiction and the Law of the Sea (Cambridge University Press 2009) and numerous articles and chapters on maritime security, Somali piracy, naval warfare, and the South China Sea dispute.

Lecture summary: While the Rohingya genocide is one of the worst incidents against minorities in recent times, ethno-nationalism and minority oppression in various forms and intensities are defining features of postcolonial states in general. Whereas most states, including Western liberal democracies, are not completely immune from ethno-nationalism and the minority ‘problem’, question remains, why are postcolonial states more vulnerable to this phenomenon? Also, why do postcolonial states respond to ethnic tensions in the manner in which they do? And, what role does international law play in all these? Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021) analyses the geneses of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states, and articulates how the postcolonial state operates as an ideology to address the ‘minority problem’. The ideological function of the postcolonial ‘national’, ‘liberal’, and ‘developmental’ state inflicts various forms of marginalisation on minorities but simultaneously justify the oppression in the name of national unity, equality and non-discrimination, and economic development. International law plays a central role in the ideological making of the postcolonial state in relation to postcolonial boundaries, liberal-individualist architecture of rights, and neoliberal economic vision of development. In the process, international law subjugates minority interests and in turn aggravates the problem of ethno-nationalism in postcolonial states. With these arguments, the book thus offers an ideology critique of the postcolonial state and examines the role of international law therein. Dr Mohammad Shahabuddin is a Reader in International Law and Human Rights at Birmingham Law School, University of Birmingham. He is also a Faculty Member for Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy (IGLP). He holds a PhD in international law from SOAS, University of London. Shahab is the author of Ethnicity and International Law: Histories, Politics and Practices (Cambridge University Press, 2016). He has recently been awarded the prestigious Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship (2018-2020) for writing his new monograph – Minorities and the Making of Postcolonial States in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2021).

Lecture summary: The presentation analyses an unprecedented new international moral and legal rule that forbids one state from hosting money stolen by the leaders of another state. The aim is to counter grand corruption or kleptocracy, when leaders of poorer countries loot billions of pounds at the expense of their citizens, and transfer the money to rich host countries like the UK, US and Switzerland. The presentation discusses the shortcomings of the effectiveness of international law in this area, and the resulting tendency to resort to creative solutions and non-state actors in recovering stolen wealth hidden abroad. Lastly, there is a link to an earlier World Bank report on the topic I co-authored at: https://star.worldbank.org/sites/star/files/puppetmastersv1.pdf Jason Sharman is the Head of the Department of Politics and International Studies at the University of Cambridge, as well as the Sir Patrick Sheehy Professor of International Relations. Sharman’s research is focused on the regulation of global finance, especially as relates to money laundering, tax, corruption and offshore financial centres, and the international relations of the early modern world. His most recent books are The Despot’s Guide to Wealth Management (Cornell University Press 2017), and Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order (Princeton University Press 2019). The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press.

Lecture summary: The idea that all states are equal, however powerful or wealthy they might be, is an axiom of international law both in theory and in practice. Yet from Araribóia to Grenfell to Hodeidah to Nauru, the astonishing levels of violence and inequality that characterise our formally post-fascist, post-colonial, post-communist world are striking. Breaking with certain methodological conventions, this talk will deploy a new, ‘modular’ approach to the study of the history of international law. Its aim in doing so is to draw attention to the process – simultaneously coercive and interpellative – through which the surface of the earth has come gradually, over the course of five centuries, to be covered in reproductions of the same, originally Western European form of human collectivity – namely, the sovereign state. Turning on their heads a series of canonical episodes from the history of international law (among them, the ‘Abyssinia Crisis’ of 1935-36), the talk will suggest that attending to this process, to the relentless logic of accumulation it sets in motion, and to the profound distributive consequences of that logic, throws into sharp relief international law’s role in perpetuating precisely the relations of domination it purports to challenge – relations that attend between species as much as they do between individuals and communities. Crucially, however, this commitment to transforming the world into a series of homogenous, ‘self-governing’ and, therefore, competitive and ruthlessly expansionist legal subjects has not been – and cannot be – entirely successful. Indeed, as the talk will show, it is, historically, in stubbornly mixed-up or hybrid nature of international legal ‘personality’ that those seeking to resist the process of international legal reproduction and its logic have often found their most powerful resources. Rose Sydney Parfitt is a Senior Lecturer at Kent Law School. Her research brings together texts, images and sounds – and traditions dedicated to analysing texts, images and sounds – with the aim of apprehending, understanding and responding more effectively to the role of international law, in the past and present, not just in ameliorating but also in constituting inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure. Her work in this area has been published widely, touching on a range of different contexts including fascist colonial architecture in Libya; the inbuilt historiography of the doctrine of sources; Italian Futurism, the First World War and contemporary fashion; international personality under the League of Nations; statehood and international recognition; the chronotope (in the Bakhtinian sense) employed by the new states at the Bandung Conference of 1955; Bolsonarismo, the far-right and the Global South, and others. Her current project, which examines the relationship between fascism and international law has been supported by grants from the Australian Research Council (2016-19), the Socio-Legal Studies Association (2019-20), and elsewhere. Her monograph, The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance, was published by Cambridge University Press in January 2019.

Lecture summary: An analogy between States and international organizations has characterised the development of the law that applies to intergovernmental institutions on the international plane. That is best illustrated by the work of the International Law Commission on the treaties and responsibility of international organizations, where the Commission for the most part extended to organizations rules that had been originally devised for States in the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties and 2001 Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. The talk, based on a recently published research monograph, will reflect on the foundations of the assumption that the two main categories of international legal subjects are analogous for certain purposes, and discuss the elusive position that international organizations occupy in the international legal system. Dr Fernando Lusa Bordin is a University Lecturer in International Law at the University of Cambridge and is a Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre.

Lecture summary: There are currently two important issues confronting the international space community. Does international space legislation permit the digging of resources from celestial bodies? And: how to get rid of the enormous amount of space junk that currently populates at interesting orbit and threaten space activities? The lecture will try to give answers to these problems by highlighting the current state of affairs with regard to space legislation which is a mix of international treaty law and what some people call “soft” law. Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. Stephan Hobe is Director of the Institute of Air Law, Space Law and Cyber Law and Professor at the University of Cologne. He is author and editor of more than 300 books and articles including “Introduction to Public International Law”, 10th edition 2014, “European Law”, 9th edition 2018 and Space Law (2019). He is member of the board of several scientific associations: International Institute of Space Law, European Centre for Space Law, membre titulaire of the Académie Française de l’Air et de l’Espace and of the International Academy of Astronautics and Vice-president of the German Society of International Law. Professor Hobe is a Visiting Fellow at the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law for the Lent Term 2020.

Join us for a panel discussion on contemporary developments and future prospects in business and human rights litigation involving transnational corporations. The expert panellists will discuss recent developments in UK courts, including legal and policy implications of the Supreme Court’s decision in Vedanta Resources (which paved the way for Zambian citizens to bring tort claims in English courts against UK-based Vedanta Resources) and the forthcoming Supreme Court appeal involving claims against Royal Dutch Petroleum in respect of environmental harm alleged to have been caused by its Nigerian subsidiary. The discussion will involve comparative and practical perspectives and will examine the broader policy and normative concerns arising from business and human rights litigation for the responsibility of non-state actors, transnational corporate governance and international law more generally.

Lecture summary to print: 20 years later - How has International Law evolved as a legal Order? In 2000, Professor Dupuy delivered the General Course of International Law at the Hague Academy of International Law in The Hague, under the title L’Unité de l’ordre juridique international; it is an argumented criticism of the theory of the so called «fragmentation» of international law. Pierre-Marie Dupuy developed in this course, published in 2003 (Vol. 297) his theory on the dialectic tension between two grounds of unity of the international legal order: on the one hand the formal one, based on the technical forms and procedures of law, directly connected with the Hart’s theory of law as developed in The Concept of Law; on the other hand, the substantial unity, a hierarchical one, based not any more on the forms, which are neutral in essence, but on the very content of some peremptory norms of international law (jus cogens); this substantial unity entails a number of rather easily identifiable rules including in particular some fundamental principles of human rights law; but, as demonstrated by the international case law, substantial unity also includes a few «fundamental» rights of the State, to speak like the ICJ in one of its advisory opinions (Legality of the Threat or Use of Nuclear Weapons, 1996) and this constitutes a supplementary factor of inherent tension. Two competing principles of unity, formal and substantial or material) for the same legal order are not necessarily the best means for ensuring the persistence and overall stability of the whole system! One would have probably been more efficient. But so it is (or was since the sixties) because of the common will of the States composing what is called «the international community of states as a whole» (Art. 51 VCLT), a term which is to be taken not as a mere description of political reality but as the recourse to what is called in legal technics «a legal fiction» (fiction juridique). In his general course, far from predicting the final supremacy of one of these grounds of unity over the other, the two of them being at the same time competing and complementary, the author privileged an open ended conclusion which is far from an Hegelian synthesis; rather, it is indicative of the impossibility of drastically forecasting the overall evolution of the whole international legal system; this is because international law is not only an abstract (and formal) combination of primary and secondary rules; it is also directly conditioned by a number of structural and/or contextual sociopolitical elements which are in constant evolution (a reason why the classical positivist doctrine does not want to take them into account). Whatever the case may be, the tension between the two sources of unity of the international legal order is at the very core of the inherent dynamic of this order. Almost twenty years after the delivery of this course, it seems interesting to review and reconsider this theory of the two kinds of unity of the international legal order (formal and substantial) in particular at a time when an increasing number of «populist» leaders very much seem to ignore, or voluntarily deny the validity of some of the key substantial principles on which the international legal system was re-founded within and around the United Nations in 1945; is, in this respect, the future of international law as a legal order more predictable than before or not? And, if yes, in which direction?