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42821. Free Lunches? WTO as Public Good, and the WTO's View of Public Goods

Author:
Petros C. Mavroidis
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The WTO can be viewed as a public good in that it provides a forum for negotiations which also produces the necessary legal framework to act as a support for agreed liberalization. To avoid any misunderstandings, in this article the discussion focuses on the WTO as a forum and a set of agreements, not on free trade. Since the legal agreements coming under its aegis are for good reasons incomplete, the WTO provides an additional public good by 'completing' the original contract through case law. The importance of this feature increases over time as tariffs are driven towards irrelevance. In turn, the WTO has no particular attitude towards public goods provided by its Members.

42822. Bilateralism at the Service of Community Interests? Non-Judicial Enforcement of Global Public Goods in the Context of Global Environmental Law

Author:
Elisa Morgera
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
The interaction between bilateral and multilateral action is evolving in the context of 'global environmental law' – a concept that is emerging from the promotion of environmental protection as a global public good through a plurality of legal mechanisms relying on a plurality of legal orders. The notion of global public goods can thus help one better to understand recent bilateral initiatives aimed at supporting the implementation of multilateral environmental agreements and the decisions of their compliance mechanisms. Innovative linkages between the compliance system under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species and bilateral trade agreements recently concluded by the European Union and the US provide an example. Innovative opportunities for bilateral initiatives supporting the implementation of the 2010 Nagoya Protocol on Access and Benefit-sharing are likely to lead to even more complex inter-relationships between different legal orders. This new approach to bilateralism that aims to support the interests of the international community can be assessed in the context of earlier debates on unilateralism, with a view to emphasizing the role of international law in the identification and delivery of global public goods, and the role of global environmental law in understanding the interactions among a plurality of legal orders.
Political Geography:
United States and Europe

42823. International Adjudication of Global Public Goods: The Intersection of Substance and Procedure

Author:
André Nollkaemper
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This article, based on the non-controversial proposition that the way and degree in which international courts can contribute to the protection of a public good depends, in part, on the procedural law of such courts, sets out to expose the plurality of connections between procedure and substance. Procedures can further the substantive values of public goods but can also serve interests of their own and can even work against such substantive values. This article articulates the normative choices that courts inevitably have to make and reflects on the question of whether, and to what extent, the shaping of these connections is properly part of the international judicial function, taking into account problems of legitimacy that may arise when judge-made procedures undo state-made substantive law.

42824. Roaming Charges: Moments of Dignity: Waitresses at Rest at the Toufuya Restaurant by the Isuzu River, Ise, Japan

Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
We deal in EJIL with the world we live in – often with its worst and most violent pathologies, often with its most promising signs of hope for a better world. But, inevitably, since our vehicle is scholarship, we reify this world. Roaming Charges is designed not just to offer a moment of aesthetic relief, but to remind us of the ultimate subject of our scholarly reflections: we alternate between photos of places – the world we live in – and photos of people – who we are, the human condition. We eschew the direct programmatic photo- graph: people shot up; the ravages of pollution and all other manner of photojournalism.
Political Geography:
Japan

42825. State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide

Author:
Vahagn Avedian
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
By studying the continuity between the Ottoman Empire and its succeeding Turkish Republic, this article aims to address one crucial aspect of the denial of the Armenian genocide by the Turkish state, namely the issue of state responsibility. There are psychological barriers in Turkey which have largely suppressed the memories of possible wrongdoings during World War I and the ensuing 'Independence War'. However, the barrier that is created by the issue of state responsibility is identified here as the fundamental obstacle for genocide recognition by the Turkish state. This article aims to apply some of the existing legal principles and theories of international law in order to test their applicability to the two Turkish states and the issue of internationally wrongful acts committed during World War I and the ensuing years. In addition to the Turkish Republic bearing the identity of the Ottoman Empire, this article suggests that the Republic not only failed to stop doing the wrongful acts of its predecessor, but it also continued the very internationally wrongful acts committed by the Young Turk government. Thus, the insurgent National Movement, which later became the Republic, made itself responsible for not only its own wrongful acts but also those of its predecessor, including the act of genocide committed in 1915–1916. The issue of possible liability has ever since the creation of the Republic formed the denialist policy which is Turkey's to this day.
Political Geography:
Turkey

42826. State Identity, Continuity, and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide: A Reply to Vahagn Avedian

Author:
Pulat Tacar and Maxime Gauin
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
We have been asked by the European Journal of International Law to write a reply to an article entitled 'State Identity, Continuity and Responsibility: The Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Turkey and the Armenian Genocide'. The article accuses Turkey of 'practising a denialist policy' with regard to 'the act of genocide committed during 1915–1916', demanding that it 'make itself responsible for its own internationally wrongful acts committed against Armenians and other Christian minorities', and also accuses it of 'expanding the massacres beyond its borders into the Caucasus and the territories of the independent Republic of Armenia'. According to the same article, there is a state succession and continuation of responsibility from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic, and the Republic must assume full responsibility for and should also repair the injury caused by the Ottoman Empire.
Political Geography:
Europe and Turkey

42827. The Peremptory Norms of the International Community

Author:
William E. Conklin
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This article claims that the quest for the identity of peremptory norms in terms of sources is misdirected. Instead of the identity of a discrete rule or right of international law, one needs to examine why a peremptory norm is binding. The latter issue addresses the referent of the identity issue: namely, the international community as a whole. Various significations of the latter are recognized and found wanting. The article examines three general forms of the international community: the community as an aggregate of inter-dependent states, the community as a rational construction, and the community as a social-cultural ethos independent of members and yet for the members. The first two forms are found wanting. First, they presuppose that a state is a self-creative author expressing its own will. Secondly, the community is reified vis-à-vis the social-cultural ethos in which the community is immersed. Thirdly, the community is exclusionary. The three problems take for granted that a territorial-like boundary separates outsiders from between insiders. The article concludes that the notion of an international community needs excavation before jurists can be assured that peremptory norms exist and why they exist.

42828. Peremptory Norms of the International Community: A Reply to William E. Conklin

Author:
Alexander Orakhelashvili
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Professor Conklin's analytical effort to explain the nature of jus cogens is not only highly impressive, but also very timely. It demonstrates the continuing relevance of jus cogens as it increasingly arises in multiple areas of international law, regardless of doctrinal calls from the 1980s onwards that it should have faded away. Since then, there have been those who have suggested that jus cogens does not make sense and should be abandoned, those who suggest that jus cogens has merely aspirational relevance and does not make a difference on the ground, and those who argue that jus cogens is merely 'primary' law, not to be applied in the area of enforcement. What happens interestingly – and problematically – is that doctrinal debates on the conceptual rationale of jus cogens and on its more specific effects are often pursued separately. Conklin's contribution is a gentle reminder of the crucial issues of the background and essence of jus cogens that both writers and practitioners often tend to overlook when addressing the implications of jus cogens in specific areas of international law.

42829. The Peremptory Norms of the International Community: A Rejoinder to Alexander Orakhelashvili

Author:
William E. Conklin
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
Alexander Orakhelashvili has generously responded to my 'The Peremptory Norms of the International Community' with an understanding which requires a clarification on my part. On the one hand, consistently with my argument, he urges the departure from the '“cut and paste” repetition' of the sources of law. Such sources offer an 'ordinary, or mainline, justification' which is 'insufficient or irrelevant' to justify peremptory norms. On the other hand, he insists that 'none of this is meant to challenge positivist foundations of international law'. Although he emphasizes public policy as an important factor in that foundation, he also highlights fundamental values and the will, choices and universality of an international community. Orakhelashvili adds that the international social ethos, which I privileged, was 'a correct premise for jus cogens, but not a sufficient one'. What is also needed, he advises, is that the ethos be given 'a legal expression' or language. When the nature of such a legal language is addressed, one is advised that the language remains a 'consensual positivism'. Public policy is emphasized as such an expression commonly accepted in domestic and international legal discourses, we are advised.

42830. Lessons of Imperialism and of the Law of Nations: Alberico Gentili's Early Modern Appeal to Roman Law

Author:
Andreas Wagner
Publication Date:
08-2012
Content Type:
Journal Article
Abstract:
This review discusses two recent publications – a critical edition of a primary source and a collection of essays – around the Theory of International Law of Alberico Gentili (1552–1608). On the one hand it examines Gentili's interest in ancient Rome and how he used it as a paradigmatic case of imperial order. But on the other, it questions our own interest in Gentili's work. In line with Gentili's own focus on questions of justice, it not only shows that Gentili presents us with his own complex blend of political responsibility and natural law, but highlights structural features and possible blind spots of his 'natural/private law' paradigm that might apply also to current suggestions of how to organize international law.