Sources of International Law

Political declarations are not new to the system established through the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The Chișinău Declaration, recently adopted by the Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers, nevertheless differs from earlier declarations that primarily addressed institutional questions, subsidiarity and the relationship between Strasbourg and domestic authorities. It engages directly with substantive questions under…

The paradoxical revival of security guarantees Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has revived the concept of security guarantees. Their content and scope have been central to scholarly and political debates about Kyiv’s resistance to the Russian aggression (see here and here). Yet, this revival highlights a…

Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, is not a source of international law. It creates no treaty obligations, modifies no customary rules, and settles no legal status for artificial intelligence. However, its relevance lies not only in the fact that it exposes a difficulty that international AI governance has not fully confronted, but also in the…

When Arthur Galston coined the term 'ecocide' in 1970, the choice to model it on 'genocide' was deliberate; the etymological echo was designed to generate political leverage and signal the gravity of environmental destruction caused by the US’ Operation Ranch Hand in Vietnam. The same analogy that gave ecocide its political traction has also constrained…