EJIL: Talk!

There will be a major ‘Changing of the Guards’ next year with the departures of Juncker, Tusk and Draghi – each of them remarkable in their own way – from the leadership team of the European Union. The incoming team will be facing a Europe that poses unprecedented challenges. Commissioner Oettinger went as far as characterizing Europe as facing ‘mortal danger’ from both within and without. I don’t exactly share the doomsday predictions as regards the Union, but the international and internal challenges are truly immense and require leadership commensurate with such.

Here is my Dream Team to lead the Union in the face of these challenges:

President of the Commission: Frans Timmermans

President of the Council: Angela Merkel

President of the European Central Bank: Christine Lagarde

At this point many readers might be chortling. Not because they necessarily disagree that this would be a formidable team to face off the likes of Trump and Putin, Salvini and Orbán. Or to face the truly daunting socio-economic challenges of the Union. But rather because it seems to defy any realistic vision of the European politics of appointments. Does it really? Suspend your disbelief for just a while. Read the rest of this entry…

EJIL relies on the good will of colleagues in the international law community who generously devote their time and energy to act as peer reviewers for the large number of submissions we receive. Without their efforts our Journal would not be able to maintain the excellent standards to which we strive. A lion’s share of the burden is borne by members of our Boards, but we also turn to many colleagues in the broader community. We thank the following colleagues for their contribution to EJIL’s peer review process in 2018:

Dapo Akande, Karen Alter, Tilmann Altwicker, José Alvarez, Alberto Alvarez-Jiminez, Maria Aristodemou, Loïc Azoulai, Björnstjern Baade, Lorand Bartels, Eyal Benvenisti, Eric Brabandere, Eva Brems, Carl Bruch, Michelle Burgis-Kasthala, Laurence Burgorgue-Larsen, Julian Chaisse, Damian Chalmers, Hilary Charlesworth, Vincent Chetail, Sungjoon Cho, Carlos Closa, Lawrence Collins, Marise Cremona, Philipp Dann, Kevin Davis, Alex De Waal, Erika De Wet, Bruno De Witte, Rosalind Dixon, Megan Donaldson, Rochelle Dreyfuss, Christoph Engel, Eleanor Fox, Francesco Francioni, Ronald Francis, Geoff Gilbert, Kirsty Gover, Gerhard Haffner, Michaela Hailbronner, Jeffrey Handmaker, James Hathaway, Laurence Helfer, Ellen Hey, Bernard Hoekman, Stefan Inama, Aline Jaeckel, Henry Jones, Daniel Joyner, Victor Kattan, Thomas Kleinlein, Michele Krech, Claus Kress, Andreas Kulick, Jürgen Kurtz, Tobias Lenz, Randall Lesaffer, Itamar Mann, Nora Markard, Petros Mavroidis, Franz Mayer, John McCrudden, Frédéric Mégret, Paul Mertenskötter, Timothy Meyer, Angelika Nussberger, Christiana Ochoa, Alexander Orakhelashvili, Stefano Osella, Diane Otto, Sundhya Pahuja, Jacqueline Peel, Steven Peers, Oren Perez, Niels Petersen, Marcela Prieto Rudolphy, Alexander Proelss, Sergio Puig, Kate Purcell, Surabhi Ranganathan, Kal Raustiala, Anthea Roberts, Nicole Roughan, Ruth Rubio-Marín, Tom Ruys, Marco Sassòli, Cheryl Saunders, Abdulhay Sayed, Stephan Schill, Edward Schramm, Joanne Scott, Ayelet Shachar, Kirsten Schmalenbach, Yuval Shany, Dinah Shelton, Vera Shikhelman, Philip Steinberg, Paul Stephan, Thomas Streinz, Péter Szigeti, Paulos Tesfagiorgis, Christian Tomuschat, Michael Trebilcock, Charles Tripp, David M. Trubek, Gus Van Harten, Jorge Viñuales, Andreas von Arnauld, Jochen von Bernstorff, Tania Voon, Michael Waibel, Rüdiger Wolfram, Margaret Young, Eyal Zamir, David Zaring, Andreas Zimmermann.

On 9 December 1948, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide – the first universal treaty of human rights – was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. This year marks its 70th anniversary and we pay tribute to its ‘founding father’, Raphael Lemkin, in this last issue of EJIL for 2018. Johann Justus Vasel preludes with a biographical vignette. In Roaming Charges we reproduce his recently discovered death certificate, and on the Last Page we feature a previously unpublished poem by Lemkin on the subject that haunted and drove him, ‘Genocide’. (We thank members of Raphael Lemkin’s family – Jane Lemkin, Peter Lemkin and Richard Lemkin – and friend, Nancy Steinson, for their kindness and generosity in sharing information with us.)

Jan Klabbers formally opens this issue with his Keynote Address on ‘Epistemic Universalism and the Melancholy of International Law’, delivered at the 2018 annual conference of the European Society of International Law, in which he diagnoses pathologies of international legal scholarship.

In our Afterword rubric, Lorna McGregor and Lorenzo Casini react to the EJIL Foreword ‘Upholding Democracy Amid the Challenges of New Technologies: What Role for the Law of Global Governance?’ by Eyal Benvenisti, published in our first issue of the year, and Benvenisti replies to his critics.

Following, we shift the focus to ‘New Voices’, with a selection of articles from the Sixth Annual Junior Faculty Forum for International Law. Veronika Fikfak, analyses how damages awarded by the European Court of Human Rights impact states’ behaviour. Drawing on (behavioural) economic analysis of law, she suggests new approaches on how to increase compliance. An Hertogen illuminates the conditions for analogical reasoning between domestic and international law. Ntina Tzouvala scrutinizes the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the emergence of statehood in the Balkans, tracing the ambivalent role of international law in constructing and containing ethnic nationalism. Building on Giorgio Agamben’s work, Daria Davitti, challenges the EU’s Agenda on Migration, contesting liquid, biopolitical borders and the evasion of international obligations by claiming an alleged state of exception resulting in mere humanitarian posturing of EU migration policies. Geoff Gordon reflects on the interrelationship between colonial practices, the global standardization of time, and transnational law. Read the rest of this entry…