LCIL International Law Centre Podcast

Lecture summary: This talk explores the history of decolonization from an economic and financial perspective. Through the examples of the French and British Empires, it shows that European settlers, officials, and other investors from North Africa and and East Africa in particular, removed assets from the colonial world upon decolonization. Yet when moving funds out of the imperial world, they often repatriated capital to a system of offshore tax havens in places such as Switzerland and the Bahamas rather than sending it to high-tax metropolitan countries like France and Britain. Decolonization thus fueled the expansion of tax havens that was taking place during these decades. This process of liquidating assets and removing capital moreover had important implications for the post-independence growth potential and development trajectory of newly independent so-called developing countries. The talk further asks what kind of effects such instances of capital flight from the colonial world had on the broader political economy of the 1950s-1970s both in the former colonial world and in metropolitan centers as well as the United States.Vanessa Ogle is associate professor of modern European history at the University of California - Berkeley, where she works on the history of capitalism, political economy, empire and decolonization, and legal history. She obtained her PhD from Harvard University and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before coming to Berkeley. Her first book, The Global Transformation of Time: 1870-1950, was published by Harvard University Press in 2015. Her current book project is Archipelago Capitalism: A History of the Offshore World, 1920s-1980s. It is the first archivally-based account of how the contemporary landscape of offshore tax havens, money markets, and flags of convenience shipping registries came into existence, with lasting implications for the rise of inequality throughout the twentieth century. Articles based off the project have appeared in the American Historical Review and most recently, in Past & Present.

Lecture summary: The current (and intensely fought) dispute over the ICC's jurisdiction in Palestine raises some interesting doctrinal and theoretical issues in international law, such as how Palestine can be considered a State for purposes of the Rome Statute while having not attained full independence or external self-determination.Once one places the ICC properly within the broader universe of international legal order, and applies the treaty interpretation principles of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, objections to jurisdiction that seem at first glance powerful, such as that Palestine is not really a State, are revealed to be on quite shaky ground.Professor Robert Howse is the Lloyd C. Nelson Professor of International Law at NYU School of Law. Professor Howse received his B.A. in philosophy and political science with high distinction, as well as an LL.B., with honours, from the University of Toronto, where he was co-editor in chief of the Faculty of Law Review. He also holds an LL.M. from the Harvard Law School. He has been a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and visiting professor at Harvard Law School, Tel Aviv University, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the University of Paris 1 (Pantheon-Sorbonne), Tsinghua University, and Osgoode Hall Law School in Canada and taught in the Academy of European Law, European University Institute, Florence.

This conversation will explore the relevance that analytical philosophy has played in contemporary international legal scholarship and the distinct contributions that it has and could offer — focusing on analytical moral and political philosophy. We will explore whether and why philosophical approaches from the analytical tradition have been displaced in recent decades (including in relation with ‘Continental’ approaches), the relationship between legal and normative (i.e., moral) considerations, and specific debates that might benefit from analytical philosophy perspectives. Focus will be placed on the role of philosophical argument in illuminating fundamental notions of international life such as self-determination and human rights, through to the key principles regulating whole regimes, such as the laws of armed conflict and the use of force, and the fair distribution of goods.Alejandro Chehtman is Professor of Law at Universidad Torcuato Di Tella (Argentina) and a Fellow at the Argentine National Research Council (CONICET). He specializes in International Criminal Law, International Humanitarian Law, and on empirical work on courts and tribunals. His work has been published in the European Journal of International Law, Legal Theory, Journal of International Criminal Justice, Leiden Journal of International Law, Law & Philosophy, and the Journal of Law & Courts, among others. He published The Philosophical Foundations of Extraterritorial Punishment (Oxford University Press), and is currently finishing a monograph on A Theory of Asymmetrical Conflicts (forthcoming with Oxford University Press).

Speakers: Prof Carlos Esposito, University Autónoma of Madrid: "Privacy and New Technologies in the Time of COVID-19"Dr Calvin Ho, University of Hong Kong: 'Ethical and Regulatory Issues in the Vaccine Race'Prof Bartha Maria Knoppers, McGill University: 'The Right to Benefit From Science and Genomic Data Sharing in the Time of COVID-19'Prof Jorge Viñuales, University of Cambridge: 'Regulating new zoonotic disease outbreaks: international legal frames'Moderator: Dr Rumiana Yotova, University of Cambridge

Lecture summary: With the EU demand for continued access to the UK's exclusive economic zone for its fishing vessels seemingly the main outstanding condition for a trade agreement with the UK, this presentation first extracts from the eponymous White Paper and Bill [Act] a number of international legal issues that they raise, before moving on to further matters given only sketchy treatment in, or omitted altogether from, those documents, on which a firmer position ought to have been taken. Lastly, a new problem apparent for the first time in the Bill is discussed: navigational freedom of foreign fishing vessels in the UK EEZ, and a missed opportunity to legislate a related evidential presumption that would assist future prosecutions for illegal fishing.Professor Andrew Serdy is Professor of the Public International Law of the Sea at the University of Southampton.

Lecture summary: Grotius is not generally considered a state theorist, but a theorist and jurist of natural law. But his accounts of natural right, sociability and sovereign power – all building blocks of his carapace of a natural legal order – generate also an exoskeleton of political order that leans upon but is not reducible to the legal order of natural law. As such, Grotius's juristic sensibility and his Roman legal methods, generate not so much a political theory of the state as a set of generative parameters for the conceptualization of the state in which the concrete constitution of state authority is historical and plural, even as it is integrated into a universal legal order. State authority is made possible and accountable under a system of natural legal right, even as its constitution is a historical achievement that should not readily be disturbed and in which a large range of freedom and unfreedom is lawful and should be accepted.Grotius theory of the state holds important lessons and implications for our contemporary world, where over the last 25 years we have grappled constantly with the problem of what a state is, the circumstances under which we might justifiably breach its sovereignty, and the profound difficulties of re-making state orders when they have failed, collapsed or been destroyed by foreign intervention.Professor Nehal Bhuta holds the Chair of Public International Law at University of Edinburgh and is Co-Director of the Edinburgh Centre for International and Global Law. He previously held the Chair of Public International Law at the European University Institute in Florence, where was also Co-Director of the Institute's Academy of European Law. He is a member of the editorial boards of the European Journal of International Law, the Journal of International Criminal Justice, Constellations and a founding editor of the interdisciplinary journal Humanity. He is also a series editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP) series in The History and Theory of International Law. Prior to the EUI he was on the faculty at the New School for Social Research, and at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law. Before entering academia, he worked with Human Rights Watch and the International Center for Transitional Justice. Nehal’s two most recent edited volumes are Freedom of Religion, Secularism and Human Rights (OUP) and Autonomous Weapons Systems - Law, Ethics, Policy (Cambridge University Press with Beck, Geiss, Liu and Kress). Nehal works on a wide range of doctrinal, historical and theoretical issues in international law, international humanitarian law, international criminal law and human rights law. He is about to start work as a General Editor (with Anthony Pagden and Mira Siegelberg) of The Cambridge History of Rights (5 volumes).

Lecture summary: In 2017, the British Government ratified the 1954 Hague Convention on the Protection of Cultural Property in Times of Armed Conflict (henceforth, the Hague Convention). This Convention, along with its two Additional Protocols, sets out the obligations of states with respect to cultural heritage in war. War throws up a range of conflicts between protecting people and protecting heritage, in terms of both the use of resources, and the imposition and incurring of risk. And yet, from UNESCO to the Blue Shield, those working in heritage insist that such conflicts between people and heritage are impossible. For example, Irina Bokova, the former director-general of UNESCO, claims that, “there is no need to choose between saving lives and preserving cultural heritage: the two are inseparable.”In this talk, I argue that the failure to recognise these conflicts comprehensively undermines the heritage community’s response to the legal demands made by the Hague Convention. If we refuse to acknowledge that these conflicts can even in principle arise, we are ill-equipped to deal with them. Given that the Hague Convention requires combatants to deal with them, this is a pressing problem.

Lecture summary: Two Visions of the International Rule of Law: When we speak of the rule of law, we generally mean to describe the attributes that make law, as an enterprise, worthwhile--the qualities that lead us to aspire to live in a society governed by law. Though international lawyers commonly invoke the concept, we have devoted little attention to explaining what it entails or how it translates to the international plane. This lecture will begin to fill that gap by presenting two distinct visions of the international rule of law. Each captures something important about law, but they are in certain respects incompatible. And while one already informs much of the thinking on international law, the second, which has largely been overlooked, might actually provide a more suitable framework for evaluating when and why international law is worthwhile.Monica Hakimi is the James V. Campbell Professor of Law and the Associate Dean for Faculty and Research at the University of Michigan Law School. Her research ties together doctrine and theory to examine how international law adapts to contemporary challenges, particularly in the areas of human and national security.

Lecture summary: The right to a fair trial is a right that enables the recognition and protection of many other human rights. Its violation can be devastating to an individual defendant, but also damaging to entire societies as unfair trials are used to undermine democracy and oppress minorities. Although the right to a fair trial has been included in all international and regional human rights instruments since the Second World War and 173 states parties to the ICCPR have pledged to uphold it, the international standard for a fair trial can be elusive. Based on my book with Amal Clooney, The Right to a Fair Trial in International Law (OUP, Summer 2020), I will shine a light on certain aspects of this fundamental human right. We have attempted to explain, in granular detail, the meaning of the right to a fair trial, drawing on how the right has been applied by international bodies including United Nations committees, regional human rights courts and commissions, and international criminal courts. I will discuss the status of the right in international law, consider who enjoys the right apart from the defendant, and examine divergences in the case law on certain components of the right and potential methods of harmonisation.

Professor Kedar will present his book Emptied Lands (co-authored with Amara and Yiftachel). Emptied Lands investigates the protracted legal, planning, and territorial conflict between the settler Israeli state and indigenous Bedouin citizens over traditional lands in southern Israel/Palestine. The authors place this dispute in historical, legal, geographical, and international- comparative perspectives, providing the first legal geographic analysis of the “dead Negev doctrine” used by Israel to dispossess and forcefully displace Bedouin inhabitants in order to Judaize the region. The authors reveal that through manipulative use of Ottoman, British and Israeli laws, the state has constructed its own version of terra nullius. Yet, the indigenous property and settlement system still functions, creating an ongoing resistance to the Jewish state. Emptied Lands critically examines several key land claims, court rulings, planning policies and development strategies, offering alternative local, regional, and international routes for justice. Professor Alexandre (Sandy) Kedar teaches at the Law School at the University of Haifa. He holds a Doctorate in Law (S.J.D) from Harvard Law School. He was a visiting professor at the University of Michigan Law School as well as a Grotius International Law Visiting Scholar there and a visiting associate professor at the Frankel Institute for Judaic studies in the University of Michigan. His research focuses on legal geography, legal history, law and society and land regimes in settler societies and in Israel. He served as the President of the Israeli Law and Society Association, is the co-coordinator of the Legal Geography CRN of the Law and Society Association and a member of its international committee. He is the co-founder (in 2003) and director of the Association for Distributive Justice, an Israeli NGO addressing these issues.