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Essential Security Interests Exceptions and the Limits of Self-Judgment: Implications of Riverside Coffee v Nicaragua

March 19, 2026

In recent years, national security has increasingly served as a justification to deviate from international law obligations. The ICSID award in Riverside Coffee v Nicaragua has added a new layer to the developing case law on the interplay between essential security interests exceptions and the notion of self-judgment in the context of investment arbitration.  Where treaties seek to accommodate security-related concerns, it is often in the form of essential security interests exceptions. These are frequently combined with ‘self-judging’ language, that is, wording that grants the invoking State particular authority in determining the application of the exception. In the past decade, States have relied on such clauses with increasing frequency, giving rise to a growing body of decisions addressing their interpretation (e.g., Seda v Colombia, discussed here, and by the author on this blog) and renewed scholarly attention to the notion of self-judgment in international law (e.g., here and here). Against this backdrop, this post begins by briefly setting out…

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U.S.’s moves to label Brazilian crime syndicates as “terrorist organizations”: a prelude to the use of force?

March 18, 2026

On March 6th, 2026, the United States re-ignited their pressure on Brazil to designate two major Brazilian crime syndicates, PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) and Comando Vermelho, as “terrorist organizations”. In this post, I will introduce the U.S. practice to label Latin American drug syndicates “terrorist organizations”, and outline how this raises issues in relation…

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‘FL7726SH’: Between The Law of the Sea and the Jus ad Bellum?

March 11, 2026

In the morning of Wednesday 25 February 2026, a Cuban government vessel carrying five border guard troops approached a speedboat, registered in the U.S. as FL7726SH, after it had, according to Cuba’s Interior Ministry, entered its territorial waters in Falcones Cay, Villa Clara province. Upon being approached for identification by the Cuban vessel, the crew of the speedboat…

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The Legality of Iran’s Closure of the Strait of Hormuz

March 10, 2026

This post assesses the legality of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz from the perspective of the law of armed conflict at sea. In the context of the rights of neutral States, it discusses the passage regime in and over the Strait of Hormuz that continues to apply in the on-going international armed conflict (IAC) that was…

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The Dismantling of UN Peace Operations under the Trump Administration

February 10, 2026

Those who had hoped for a more auspicious start to the new year for multilateralism were quickly disillusioned by recent developments concerning Venezuela, Greenland and beyond. Simultaneously, the United States (US) President contended that he ‘doesn’t need international law’ but is guided instead by his ‘own morality’.

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