EJIL Book Discussion

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A Comment on Disobeying the Security Council

Antonios Tzanakopoulos has written a powerful book in Disobeying the Security Council. It is a rich – at times very rich – piece of scholarship, covering a range of complex issues. The book makes two important arguments (and at that ones I agree with!). First (a point of course already made before), that it is states themselves which are the ultimate judges of the legality of the Security Council’s decisions. In a decentralized system lacking any compulsory and systematic means of judicial control and dispute resolution, self-help may turn out to be the only game in town. It is by choosing to openly disobey (or more frequently, very narrowly interpret) decisions of the Security Council that they regard as unlawful that states act as a check against the Security Council abusing its powers. Second (and relatedly), that much of the scholarly discussion regarding the legality of Security Council action tends to adopt a domestic public law mindset, whether quite consciously or at times uncritically, a mindset which is inappropriate when some of the underpinnings of domestic public law,…

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Debating Disobeying the Security Council – is it a matter of ‘a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’?

Erika de Wet is Co-Director and Professor of International Law, Institute for International and Comparative Law in Africa, University of Pretoria (South Africa); Professor of International Constitutional Law, University of Amsterdam (The Netherlands). The author’s critique is based on views developed in Chapters 4 and 10 of her monograph entitled The Chapter VII Powers of the United Nations Security Council…

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An Overview of Disobeying the Security Council

I. Introduction Disobedience of an illegal or unjust command has long been a source of inspiration and scholarly excitement for lawyers, philosophers, and even dramatists, among many others. One of the best known tragedies of Sophocles, Antigone, sees the heroine defy the edict of Creon, the ruler of Thebes, in order to comply with the superior (in her view) rule…

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Book Discussion: Disobeying the Security Council

I am happy to announce that this week we will be hosting a discussion on Antonios Tzanakopoulos’ new book with OUP, Disobeying the Security Council: Countermeasures against Wrongful Sanctions. Antonios is lecturer in international law at the University of Glasgow School of Law, and is of course well-known to the readers of this blog as…

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The Rise of International Criminal Law: A Further Rejoinder to Roth and Anderson

Editor's Note: This post is part of series discussing the 2009 EJIL Article by Professor Kenneth Anderson: “The Rise of International Criminal Law: Intended and Unintended Consequences,” . Previous posts in this discussion were by Ken Anderson (see here, here here and here), Brad Roth and Amrita Kapur. You can read these posts by clicking on…

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