Asset recovery is a fundamental principle of anti-corruption law, without which the financial damage from corruption cannot be repaired. Yet recovering assets is notoriously difficult and time-consuming, and the United Nations Convention Against Corruption provides little technical or institutional support to facilitate such returns. To remedy this, we propose the creation of a transnational asset recovery mechanism that could provide myriad services to states upon request, including gathering and publishing information, providing technical assistance and capacity building, helping to conclude agreements on asset return, and monitoring returned funds. Theoretically, we introduce the concepts of customizability and selectability to explain why a flexible transnational asset recovery mechanism has advantages over more formal international institutions, such as an international anti-corruption court. These benefits include lower financial and political costs, enhanced adaptability, and a greater likelihood of enhancing interstate cooperation regarding asset returns.

Numerous governments have responded to the COVID-19 pandemic by declaring states of emergency and restricting individual liberties protected by international law. However, many more states have adopted emergency measures than have formally derogated from human rights conventions. This Editorial Comment critically evaluates the existing system of human rights treaty derogations. It analyzes the system's problems, identifies recent developments that have exacerbated these problems, and proposes a range of reforms in five areas—embeddedness, engagement, information, timing, and scope.

This introduction provides an overview of thirteen essays selected in response to a worldwide call for papers for an Agora on “The International Legal Order and the Global Pandemic.” The essays in the Agora consider some of the most pressing challenges, as well as potential opportunities, that COVID-19 is creating for the international legal order. The specific topics addressed include the role of international organizations such as the World Health Organization, state responsibility, human rights, financial regulation, and international trade. Contributors were invited to address the theme from a historical, institutional, doctrinal, normative, critical, or geopolitical perspective, or a mix of perspectives.

International organizations rarely die, but they often become irrelevant. The mere fact of the International Labour Organization's (ILO's) survival thus says little about its accomplishments or impact. Yet the ILO has a rich history of reinventing itself in response to shifts in global labor conditions, and it has responded to those changes with legal and policy innovations that once attracted widespread attention and praise but have recently been met mostly with indifference.

It is a pleasure and an honour to give a masterclass on treaty withdrawal. This is an especially appropriate topic for an ESIL Research Forum focused on international law in times of disorder and contestation. I am grateful to Professor Yuval Shany and the other organisers for inviting me to share with you my long-standing interest in exit in international law and politics.

Courts in the United Kingdom and South Africa have recently issued important rulings that have constrained the executive's authority to withdraw from treaties in those countries. This essay considers whether these rulings might offer insights for treaty exit issues in the United States. We first provide an overview of U.S. law and practice regarding the termination of international agreements. We next summarize the U.K. and South African decisions, which required parliamentary approval for pulling out of treaties establishing the European Union and the International Criminal Court (ICC), respectively. Finally, we consider the relevance of these rulings for treaty withdrawals in the United States. We conclude that they are unlikely to offer much guidance, both because of differences in the three countries' constitutions and because the reasoning of the U.K. and South African courts do not engage with the central arguments made in the United States concerning the President's unilateral authority to withdraw from treaties.

This piece is adapted from an address delivered to a conference sponsored by the Council of Europe and PluriCourts on The Long-Term Future of the European Court of Human Rights in Oslo, Norway on April 7, 2014.

This post addresses the successes and challenges for the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), as seen from the outside. It draws upon my co-authored research on human rights systems outside of Europe to explain how these systems have responded to some of the same challenges now facing the Council of Europe and the ECtHR. My main contention is that international human rights courts, wherever they are located, require sustained political and material support if they are to thrive and grow over time.

In a working paper based on extensive field research and interviews, Karen Alter, James Gathii, and I analyze three recent backlash attempts against sub-regional courts in East, West, and Southern Africa. Our paper analyzes credible proposals by African governments to restrict the jurisdiction of these courts in response to politically embarrassing rulings. These events are not widely known, and they are at odds with the prevailing view that it is difficult to sanction international judges.

Do international court judgments influence the behavior of actors other than the parties to a dispute? Are international courts agents of policy change or do their judgments merely reflect evolving social and political trends? We develop a theory that specifies the conditions under which international courts can use their interpretive discretion to have system-wide effects. We examine the theory in the context of European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) rulings on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) issues by creating a new data set that matches these rulings with laws in all Council of Europe (CoE) member states. We also collect data on LGBT policies unaffected by ECtHR judgments to control for the confounding effect of evolving trends in national policies. We find that ECtHR judgments against one country substantially increase the probability of national-level policy change across Europe. The marginal effects of the judgments are especially high where public acceptance of sexual minorities is low, but where national courts can rely on ECtHR precedents to invalidate domestic laws or where the government in power is not ideologically opposed to LGBT equality. We conclude by exploring the implications of our findings for other international courts.

The Community Court of Justice of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS Court) is an increasingly active and bold adjudicator of human rights. Since acquiring jurisdiction over human rights complaints in 2005, the ECOWAS Court has issued numerous decisions condemning human rights violations by the member states of the Economic Community of West African States (Community). Among this Court’s path-breaking cases are judgments against Niger for condoning modern forms of slavery and against Nigeria for impeding the right to free basic education for all children. The ECOWAS Court also has broad access and standing rules that permit individuals and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) to bypass national courts and file suits directly with the Court. Although the Court is generally careful in the proof that it requires of complainants and in the remedies that it demands of governments, it has not shied away from politically courageous decisions, such as rulings against the Gambia for the torture of journalists and against Nigeria for failing to regulate multinational companies that have degraded the environment of the oil-rich Niger Delta.

Several prominent human rights treaties seek to minimize violations during emergencies by authorizing states to “derogate”—that is, to suspend certain civil and political liberties—in response to crises. The drafters of these treaties envisioned that international restrictions on derogations, together with international notification and monitoring mechanisms, would limit rights suspensions during emergencies. This article analyzes the behavior of derogating countries using new global data sets of derogations and states of emergency from 1976 to 2007. We argue that derogations are a rational response to domestic political uncertainty. They enable governments facing serious threats to buy time and legal breathing space from voters, courts, and interest groups to confront crises while signaling to these audiences that rights deviations are temporary and lawful. Our findings have implications for studies of treaty design and flexibility mechanisms, and compliance with international human rights agreements.