These are challenging times for the European Union. Internally, important, even fundamental, decisions are on the agenda as the Union struggles with the Euro crisis and its underlying economic fissures. (Mercifully, the scapegoating of the USA as an escape from facing Europe’s very own breathtaking governmental and private-sector financial and fiscal irresponsibility has all but disappeared – mercifully, since facing reality unflinchingly is a necessary condition for dealing with it effectively.) What is subprime in Europe is the decisional structure of the Union: the European Politburo – President of the Commission, newly-minted President of the Council, tired-old-more-senseless-than-ever rotating Member State Presidency, recycled High Representative answerable to two bosses and thus to none – has proven at best irrelevant to the real actors in you know where (Berlin, Paris, the formidable Merkel, the erratic Sarkozy), at worst distracting – was the able President of the Council’s productive moves really helped by the forced tango with his opposite number at the Commission? About a year after the entry into force of the Treaty of Lisbon, it is clear that at least some of the principal objectives intended by the new decisional structure at the top are turning out to be as ineffective (some claim laughable) as critics anticipated.

Externally, the world sans-Amerique (or at least with a terribly weakened America) is not waiting for Europe either. Here, the non-handshake of Catherine Ashton and Saeed Jalili, Iran’s representative to the resumed talks, was an image emblematic at many levels of the depth of the international challenges and Europe’s worrying circumstance. (more…)

My entire professional life has been in the law, but nothing had prepared me for this. I have been a tenured faculty member  at the finest institutions, most recently Harvard and NYU.  I have held visiting appointments from Florence to Singapore, from Melbourne to Jerusalem. I have acted as legal counsel to governments on four continents, handled cases before the highest jurisdictions and arbitrated the most complex disputes among economic ‘super powers.’

Last week, for the first  time I found myself  in the dock, as a criminal defendant. The French Republic v Weiler on a charge of Criminal Defamation. The setting could not have been grander.  As I entered the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris, the French Old Bailey, my lawyer whispered: ‘Emile Zola was tried here.’ Vive la difference: This was no Dreyfus Affair but the stakes for Academic Freedom and liberty of expression are huge.

As Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law and its associated Book Reviewing website, I commissioned and then published a review of a book on the International Criminal Court. It was not a particularly favorable review. You may see all details here.  The author of the book, claiming defamation, demanded I remove it. I examined carefully the claim and concluded that the accusation was fanciful. Unflattering? Yes. Defamatory, by no stretch of imagination. It was my ‘Voltairian’ moment. I refused the request. I did offer to publish a reply by the author. This offer was declined.

Three months later I was summoned to appear before an Examining Magistrate in Paris based on a complaint of criminal defamation lodged by the author. Why Paris you might ask? Indeed. The author of the book was an Israeli academic. The book was in English. The publisher was Dutch. The reviewer was a distinguished German professor. The review was published on a New York website.

Beyond doubt, once a text or image go online, they become available worldwide, including France. But should that alone give jurisdiction to French courts in circumstances such as this? Does the fact that the author of the book, it turned out, retained her French nationality before going to live and work in Israel make a difference? Libel tourism – libel terrorism to some — is typically associated with London, where notorious high legal fees and punitive damages coerce many to throw in the towel even before going to trial. Paris, as we would expect, is more egalitarian and less materialist. It is very plaintiff friendly. (more…)

The latest issue of the European Journal of International Law has recently been published. A Table of Contents is available here on EJIL’s website

This issue begins with a symposium on treaty interpretation. The principal EJIL 20th Anniversary symposia were extra-systemic: looking at the way international law deals with the use of force or certain aspects of globalization.  For this issue of Volume 21, we chose a different tack. The aim was to hold a workshop with an ‘introspective’ focus, honing in on the processes of international law as a legal discipline. The goal was to re-examine a classical topic. The issue of treaty interpretation or re-interpretation immediately presented as both important and interesting.  Thus, a lively workshop on this topic was held last November in Florence.

Our panel of authors included George Letsas, Leena Grover, Lucas Lixinski, Isabelle Van Damme and Riccardo Pavoni. Luigi Crema also submitted a fine paper on this topic, which we later added. After much dialogue and revision, we are pleased to publish our symposia, The Interpretation of Treaties – A Re-examination. 

Next, we publish three articles under our occasional series, Critical Review of International Governance.  In our last issue, we published three articles in this series from authors hailing from Ethiopia, China and Malaysia.  In this issue, all of our ‘Critical Review’ authors call Europe home and focus respectively on European institutions.  As with our last iteration of this series, however, we suspect you will find that in critically confronting the operations of a specific ‘global’ institution, these authors provide important contributions to broader debates on global governance. Here at the EJIL we often find that it is the confrontation with the particular that gives us a better understanding of the whole. The first is an article by Juliet Chevalier-Watts on investigations under Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights.  Next is an article by Frank Hoffmeister. The EJIL has long been interested in questions of state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts. Hoffmeister studies this issue through a new lens, examining how the European Union might bear responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, taking particular note of the International Law Commission’s draft articles on the attribution of responsibility to international organizations. Last we have an article by Anne-Sophie Tabau and Sandrine Maljean-Dubois that considers the relationship between the Kyoto Protocol System and the European Union.

We also publish in this issue a Review Essay by Sergio Dellavalle, which fleshes out the central arguments from a number of texts on the topic of global order.  All authors chosen by Dellavalle write within the universalist paradigm of international law.  This essay’s contribution is that it serves as an able guide to a number of recent distinctions within this mode of thought.

We conclude with a poem, Cosmos Assessed by Eric Stein.

For at least 20 years I have been conducting guerrilla warfare against legal publishers on the matter of copyright. Whenever I get a copyright form I either ‘forget’ to send it back to the publisher (in more than half the cases no one seems to notice or care) or, if they do insist, I always cross out the critical language concerning my intellectual property (they usually ask you to make them a gift of your copyright) and replace it with a handwritten grant of a non-exclusive licence. I was challenged only once. I informed the publisher of the journal in question (Blackwell) that if they were unhappy they should feel free to drop my piece. That did not happen. The first footnote proudly displayed: ©JHH Weiler.

I remember the moment of change. The publisher in question was Walter De Gruyter, publisher of the multi-volume series Integration through Law, of which I was co-editor and in which I had published a couple of pieces myself. Some years later I wanted to photocopy one of the pieces for my students. University copy-centres in the USA take copyright seriously and requested a release from the publishers. I requested such from De Gruyters, who promptly sent it accompanied by a hefty bill. They owned, it appeared, the copyright on my work and were now re-selling it for a profit. (two years later I would presumably receive a 10% royalty on the fee I had paid….) Res ipsa loquitur.

Consider the raw deal we authors get from most legal publishers, including law journals. Typically you are asked in exchange for publishing your brilliant piece, the result of many months of research, drafting and redrafting, to cede your copyright to the publisher of the journal. Now make no mistake: law journals are a serious source of profit for publishers. The break-even point occurs at a remarkably low subscription rate. Internet publishing has made them even more profitable – as the ratio between paper subscription (with the heavy costs of production, warehousing and delivery) and the cheaper online-only version shifts to the latter. Internet journal publishing has given a considerable boost to another source of publisher income: online access to individual articles. In the past it was rare that a publisher would get a significant second bite at the apple. After all, how many permission requests for republication would come their way after the initial publication of an article in the printed journal? But now, with internet research there is an appreciable market for the one-of-a-kind-download-for-payment, which generates very considerable income for the publisher. You, the author, see none of this. The issue is not the money. It is the restriction of access to our work that rankles.

The prevailing fiction is that you give your copyright in exchange for publication, which does involve costs and which gives you fame and recognition. But that would be like saying that in exchange for exhibiting his or her paintings, an artist must actually give them to the gallery or museum as a gift. By simply allowing the journal to publish your piece, by giving them a licence, you are giving them something of value. People subscribe to the journal because enough authors of quality like yourself allow their work to be published therein. So on what ground should one be asked to give away, for ever, the intellectual property in one’s work? (more…)

Four very different articles flesh out this second issue of our 21st volume. First is an article by Christopher Macleod on Crimes against Humanity. The Editors believe that our readers will enjoy this valuable philosophical account of the subject. Next is a detailed article by Marco Dani entitled, ‘Remedying European Legal Pluralism: The FIAMM and Fedon Litigation and the Judicial Protection of International Trade Bystanders’. Our third article by Monica Hakimi, ‘State Bystander Responsibility’, provides a fresh take on a much-discussed topic – offering a new generalized framework for conceptualizing the responsibilities of states for protecting persons from third party abuses. We have published several articles on this theme and will continue to do so for some time. It reflects our belief that we are in the midst of an important shift in the concept of State Responsibility. A shift from from primarily negative to positive obligations, from State Responsibility to the Responsibility of States. Neither state practice, nor the theoretical and conceptual contours of this shift have been sorted out. But EJIL is one place where the ‘basic science’ is taking shape. Hakimi’s paper suggests, inter alia, an important analogy between state bystander responsibility and our expectation that states respond to gender-based private acts of violence, an analogy we consider pertinent and illuminating. Last, we have an article by Santiago Villalpando which tackles the ever-important question of how we might conceive of an ‘international community’ and its status under international law.

International governance is another of our commitments rooted in the belief that it provides a more potent tool both analytically to understand and normatively to critique a host of international phenomena. Under this iteration of our occasional series, Critical Review of International Governance, we include pieces by colleagues in Ethiopia, China and Malaysia. First is a piece by Dereje Zeleke Mekonnen on the Nile Basin Cooperative Framework Agreement negotiations and the adoption of a ‘Water Security’ paradigm. Second is an article by Kong Lingjie on data protection and transborder data flow in the European and global context. Last, we have a piece by Gurdial Singh Nijar entitled, ‘Incorporating Traditional Knowledge in an International Regime on Access to Genetic Resources and Benefit Sharing: Problems and Prospects’. We expect that you will find each piece both unique and also valuable to broader discussions on international governance.

Book Reviewing and Academic Freedom

My deep thanks for the hundreds of letters of support and indignation. All letters of support, including the many we received from editors of learned journals, have been translated into French and will be submitted to the Court. The Trial takes place on 25 June. I will report to our readers here on this blog.

Editor’s note: The hearing of the case has been postponed, for technical reasons, to January 20, 2011.

The Last Page 

In ‘The Last Page’, EJIL’s reminder that there is more to life than law, you will find a poem by Jake Marmer, entitled ‘When an Immigrant’.

The first wave, in the 1950s and ‘60s, was all about Community Rights and that new legal order. In the 1970s and ‘80s it was, ex nihilo, Individual Human Rights. And in the 1990s and this last decade it has been Citizenship Rights, destined, according to the European Court of Justice in case after case, to become the ‘fundamental’ status of European Citizens. (Have you ever wondered, as I have, about the epistemic status of this most recent mantra of the ECJ? Is it a legal realist prediction? A political desideratum? A statement of judicial intent? A revolutionary manifesto – seeing that it flatly contradicts the express provisions of the Treaty which clearly assigns to European Citizenship a mere supplementary or complementary supportive role in the Citizenship arena?) Be that as it may, there can be little argument that The Individual and his or her Rights are the most common, oft cited, self-celebratory clichés in the vocabulary of European legal discourse. In celebrating the Union’s 50th birthday Angela Merkel, speaking for most of us, veritably gushed about Europe’s success in positioning The Individual in the centre of its construct. And so it has. Likewise, if we look for a currency which is impervious to all market vicissitudes, to derivatives, to toxic bundling, it is the currency of Rights – in all three denominations, European, Human and/or Citizenship. It is the ever ready dividend which the Union’s Board of Directors is generous in showering on an ever apathetic citizenry (as evidenced by the demoralizing decline in voter turn out for Euro-Parliament elections) and which is evoked whenever a pep-talk is called for.

Given history, it is not surprising why, say, Germany (the initiator of the Charter), German Institutions (e.g. the Constitutional Court of ‘So long as’ rhetorical fame) and Germans (viz. Merkel who has a double reason) are so fond of Rightspeak, whereas, say, the British are more pragmatic and matter-of-fact on the issue. And whilst it is important to remain ever vigilant blah blah blah, the truth is that in Europe The Individual does not suffer from a deficit of rights protection – certainly not of human rights protection. The never-ending rhetoric is all too often a mask for a veritable political deficit of individual empowerment in European democracy. Rights and Circus may be the apposite motto for the Turn-of-Millennium Europe: smother them with rights – which they don’t exactly need – and keep them quiet.

The principal positive effect of the combination of Rights and The Individual in the European legal order has not been the defence of the individual against some Barbarians intent on abusing his or her human rights. It has, instead, been that unprecedented strengthening of the Rule of Law among the Member States, a signal achievement worthy of celebration. (more…)

There are few legal issues which still manage to evoke civic passion in the wider population. Increasingly, and sometimes for the wrong reasons, the place of religion in our public spaces has become one of them. In the age of the internet and Google we can safely assume that all readers of this Journal will have either read the Lautsi decision of the European Court of Human Rights or have read about it, thus obviating the need for the usual preliminaries. As is known, a Chamber of the Court held that the displaying in Italian public schools of the crucifix was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Independently of one’s view of the substantive result, the decision of the Second Chamber of the ECtHR is an embarrassment. There are few long-term issues on the European agenda that are more urgent, more complex and more delicate than the way we deal with the challenging problems of State and Church, religious minorities, the questions of collective identities of Europe and within Europe, and the parameters of uniformity and diversity of our states and within our states. All these issues are encapsulated in Lautsi. All are disposed of, Oracle like, in 11 impatient and apodictic paragraphs. Compare this to the 90 pages of the Supreme Court of the UK in the recent JFS Case, to give but one example.[1]

The European Court of Human Rights is not an Oracle. It is a dialogical partner with the Member States Parties to the Convention, and the legitimacy and persuasiveness of its decisions resides both in their quality and communicative power. The ECtHR is simultaneously reflective and constitutive of the European constitutional practices and norms. When there is a diverse constitutional practice among the Convention States – and there certainly is in this area – the Court needs to listen, not only preach, and to be seen to be listening. In this decision not only does it not engage with the rich jurisprudence, doctrine and practice to be found in many of the Member States, while blithely citing mostly its own decisions, it does not even address some of the issues raised by the defendant state. (more…)

We begin this issue with a symposium to honour one of our Founding Editors, Professor Antonio Cassese, who recently celebrated his 70th birthday. Many happy returns.  We publish five short pieces on the role that public international law plays and can play in the protection of individuals, a topic of abiding concern to Nino. From a variety of perspective our writers, Giorgio Gaja, Christian Tomuschat, Andrew Clapham, Luigi Condorelli and Francesco Francioni each provide tribute by providing insight in this particular area of international law.  We extend warm thanks to Paola Gaeta, an EJIL Editorial Board member, for Guest Editing this symposium.

In our articles section you will find a trenchant piece by B.S. Chimni – ‘Prolegomena to a Class Approach to International Law’ –with a distinct and challenging theoretical voice.  Next, we have an article by Mario Mendez entitled, ‘The Legal Effect of Community Agreements: Maximalist Treaty Enforcement and Judicial Avoidance Techniques’, which suggests that a ‘twin-track’ approach to treaty enforcement is developing in the European Community.  We turn then to two pieces which engage with fresh questions concerning international humanitarian law.  We hope you will read these articles by Katherine Del Mar and Carlo Focarelli as logical extensions of the symposium in this issue.  Our final article by Roozbeh Baker addresses an ever fresh topic: ‘Customary International Law in the 21st Century: Old Challenges and New Debates’.

As part of our occasional series – Critical Review of International Governance – we publish a piece by Milagros Álvarez-Verdugo  which investigates the relationship between climate change and the Non-Proliferation Treaty. Life continues even after the Copenhagen farce.

In an earlier editorial, we encouraged review essays which cover a variety of texts on a single topic.  In this issue we include a good example of an insightful review essay by Lindsey Cameron and Rebecca Everly on territorial administration. 

The Last Page features a poem by Laura Coyne entitled ‘Market Fictions’ – food for the soul.

We are happy to announce that over the next few days Tolga Yalkin will be posting on EJIL:Talk! a series of pieces dealing with aspects of international investment law. Readers will remember that, last month, Tolga posted a piece on EJIL:Talk! titled “International Investment Arbitration: Poisoned at the Root?”  (which was discussed over at Opinio Juris)

Tolga is a graduate student at the Faculty of Law, University of Oxford and is the President of Oxford Pro Bono Publico, a public interest law program of the Oxford Law Faculty. His Oxford thesis considers the international minimum standard of treatment in international investment law.

Gaza – From Warfare to Lawfare.

For many years I taught a Seminar on the legal aspects of the Arab Israeli conflict at Harvard Law School. It was unlike any other of my courses or seminars. The participants, students and researchers, were more passionate and engaged than normal. As expected, there was always a group of passionate pro-Israelis (mostly but not exclusively Jewish). There was always a group of passionate pro-Arabs, or, at times it felt, anti-Israelis (mostly but, of course, not exclusively Jewish) Sure, they came to learn, but mostly how to sharpen the arguments for ‘their’ side in the conflict. “Lawfare” – the continuation of warfare through other means – well describes the gestalt. There were, of course, also a few  who came to learn, understand, disentangle myth from reality, sort out the facts and, normatively, seek a modicum of truth and justice in a conflict which often seems to pit right against right, and wrong against wrong. But not once did this latter group constitute a critical mass.

Law is so Janus-like: There is the advocacy face, especially in the Anglo-American tradition (in the development of which the importance of lay juries surely played a role), which passionately advocates for one side or another under  the problematic theory that adversarial arguments will lead to truth. But there is also the dispassionate face of law which privileges the disinterested, so-far-as-possible objective and clinical examination of fact and legal argument (and please, spare your breath, I, and most readers of this Journal, are all aware of indeterminacy, the conceptual and empirical problems with the notion of objectivity etc.)  There was a tug of war between these two approaches, but the first habitually crowded out the second. (more…)