This article demonstrates that it is doubtful whether the accountability mechanisms available in connection with operative missions conducted under the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) provide a sufficient level of protection when human rights are violated. The assessment of the CSDP accountability mechanisms—the Court of Justice of the European Union, domestic courts of EU Member States, and other mechanisms at the international level—is conducted in light of the requirements laid down in Article 13 of the European Convention of Human Rights. The consequences of the insufficiency of these mechanisms for the EU's accession to the ECHR are also touched upon.

The article discusses the increasing use by international courts and tribunals of domestic explanatory materials—such as various statements, reports, and explanatory memoranda that usually complement the domestic approval of treaties—in the process of treaty interpretation. After examining the types of materials that can be used as interpretative aids in accordance with the general rules on treaty interpretation (Articles 31–32 VCLT), the article scrutinizes the various ways in which domestic explanatory materials have informed the interpretation of treaty provisions in the practice of international adjudicatory bodies. The analysis focuses on the legal grounds on which such materials have been admitted in the interpretative process, the reasons for which resort has been made to them by the adjudicating body, as well as the circumstances in which such documents have been invoked by the litigating parties. The article then discusses certain advantages and disadvantages stemming from the use of domestic explanatory materials in the interpretative process.

The ongoing Syrian civil war calls for a re-evaluation of using force to protect human rights. This article does not rake over the much-debated issue of whether a right of humanitarian intervention exists as lex lata. Instead, it addresses the little reviewed normative issue of whether the right should exist in international law to support and reflect a pluralistic understanding of sovereignty. Despite advancements in international human rights law, international humanitarian law and international criminal law, this wider fabric of international law preserves Westphalian sovereignty and the principle of non-intervention. It denies any right of humanitarian intervention.

Internet communication has long been known to pose a challenge to private international law and its reliance on geographical connecting factors. This article looks at the problem from the perspective of EU private international law and argues that the way in which it has been accommodated by Regulations Brussels I, Rome I, and II conflicts with some of its central paradigms. It advances an alternative approach that would generally submit claims against information society service providers established in the EU to the jurisdiction and substantive laws of their ‘country of origin’ but make certain exceptions for private persons and consumers. The article argues that implementing such an approach would require little legislative change, be more faithful to the particularities of internet communication, and give greater effect to the central paradigms of EU private international law.

The rule of temporary refuge forms the cornerstone of the response of States to large-scale influx of refugees. In the context of civilians fleeing armed conflict, this legal rule imposes a positive obligation on all States to admit and not to return anyone to a situation where there is a risk to life, and to provide basic rights commensurate with human dignity. Also implicit in the rule is the expectation of shared responsibility for large numbers of refugees and of international cooperation towards finding durable solutions. This article examines the customary international law of temporary refuge (also known as temporary protection) in relation to the Syrian conflict. It discusses implementation of the rule in the practice of three countries neighbouring Syria, and in the EU. It finds that the practice of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan has been consistent with the rule of temporary refuge. However, the EU has decided not to use the Temporary Protection Directive; instead individual Member States have relied on the Refugee Convention and EU law, combined with various other measures not pertinent to temporary protection. It is concluded that shared responsibility is the linchpin of temporary refuge. Absent this keystone, the rule of temporary refuge is likely to continue to be implemented primarily in a regional context by those countries nearest to the country affected by the conflict, as in the case of Syria.

Non-execution of the judgments of the European Court of Human Rights is a matter of serious concern. In order to address it, the reasons for and dynamics of non-execution need to be fully considered. This paper engages with non-execution by sketching the underpinning issues that help to explain it and, we argue, must shape our responses to it. Through this engagement, we conclude that non-execution is properly understood as a phenomenon that requires political rather than legal responses. This calls into question the usefulness of the infringement proceedings contained in Article 46(4) of the Convention and which it has recently been suggested ought to be embraced in attempts to address non-execution. We argue that, even if the practical difficulties of triggering Article 46(4) proceedings could somehow be overcome, the dynamics of non-execution suggest that such proceedings would be both futile and counterproductive, likely to lead to backlash against the Court and unlikely to improve States’ execution of its judgments.

As States that use the death penalty liberally in a world that increasingly favours abolition, the Muslim-majority jurisdictions that are strict exponents of Islamic law and the People's Republic of China share a crucial commonality: their frequent use of victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements to remove convicted murderers from the threat of execution. In both cases, rather than a prisoner's last chance at escaping execution being recourse to executive clemency, victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements fulfil largely the same purpose, together with providing means of compensating victims for economic loss, and enabling the State concerned to reduce execution numbers without formally limiting the death penalty's scope in law. Utilizing the functionalist approach of comparative law methodology, this article compares the 13 death penalty retentionist nations that have incorporated Islamic law principles into their positive criminal law with the People's Republic of China, as to the functions underpinning victim–perpetrator reconciliation agreements in death penalty cases.

Poverty and environmental degradation are two of the gravest issues facing the planet today. The most obvious means of addressing each issue, however, appears ostensibly to undermine the other. While environmental and development strategies are largely associated with the concept of sustainable development that emerged in the 1990s, the debate between these two interests dates back to the 1940s. This article seeks to fill an apparent gap in environmental scholarship by presenting a history of the environmental protection/development relationship. It will argue that, rather than being the product of an organic development process, the concept of sustainable development and the principles underlying it were consciously shaped by a number of international actors with vested interests in their trajectory. Understanding why and how this was permitted is important not only for its capacity to throw light on the past, but also for its ability to assist in understanding and predicting the future.

In recent years, there has been a surge of private investment in space resources and the enactment of domestic legislation aimed at protecting property rights over the resources to be extracted. This article argues that the unilateral exploitation of space resources is not prohibited by the principle of non-appropriation and is consistent with the freedom of use for common benefit and interests, with the caveat that it does not exclude others from exploitation or exacerbate inequality among States. It also argues that a laissez-faire approach would be detrimental to the orderly, sustainable and safe exploitation and use of space resources and calls for the establishment of an international regulatory regime consisting of rules concerning international coordination, benefits sharing and environmental protection.

Extraterritorial application of domestic competition law is an important feature of the current regulatory framework governing anticompetitive conduct. Japan was initially hesitant to apply its Antimonopoly Act in such a manner. However, over the last two decades there has been a significant shift in its approach. Japan has gradually embraced extraterritoriality and the Japan Fair Trade Commission has actively enforced competition law in a purely offshore context. This article investigates this evolution and considered the most recent and controversial cases in which Japan has applied its laws in a distinctive fashion.

In his Fourth Report on the Identification of Customary International Law (2016), Special Rapporteur Sir Michael Wood confirmed that ‘[i]n certain cases, the practice of international organizations also contributes to the expression, or creation, of rules of customary international law’. That the practice of international organizations can be relevant when identifying customary international law is relatively uncontroversial. The issue that is more debated is the extent to which the practice of international organizations as such may contribute to the development of customary international law. Using examples from the European Union's treaty practice and from the Court of Justice of the European Union, this article argues that international organizations may contribute to such practice, not only by representing the collective will of States, but as autonomous actors in their own right.

This article examines the legal transfer of restrictive race-based immigration laws across self-governing settler societies in the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These societies shared the common policy objective of limiting Chinese and other ‘non-white’ immigration. They each also faced informal and formal restrictions on implementing overtly racist immigration policies. This created fertile ground for legal transfers. When an innovation was found that could achieve the policy goal of race-based immigration restriction, without direct reference to race, it quickly spread across all jurisdictions operating in that paradigm. The legal transfer of three mechanisms is examined: (1) landing taxes; (2) passenger-per-ship restrictions; and (3) literacy tests. The article concludes by drawing parallels with contemporary transfers of restrictive border control policies targeting asylum seekers and irregular migrants more broadly.

To what extent is EU company law harmonized? This article first makes the point that little progress has been made in the direction of company law uniformity within the EU. It then argues that, even leaving aside the question of whether it would be desirable to have a uniform EU company law, that outcome is simply impossible to achieve, due to interest group resistance and the variety in national meta-rules. Yet it concludes that, in a narrow meaning, European company laws have indeed been harmonized: European Member States company laws fit together, which may well be what harmonization, not only etymologically, is all about.