In This Issue

EJIL’s year-long symposium ‘Re-Theorizing International Organizations Law’ continues in this issue with two articles that put the spotlight on thinkers of international organizations law beyond the usual suspects. Kehinde Olaoye introduces Samuel K.B. Asante’s academic writings and experience as an international civil servant in a now-defunct UN unit specializing in transnational corporations. Olaoye takes Asante’s intellectual and professional trajectory as an occasion to reflect on the place of Third World approaches in international organizations law. In the next contribution to the symposium, Francisco-José Quintana examines the legacy of Jorge Castañeda as a semi-peripheral jurist whose work signals the many ways international organizations can harm, empower, or elude the control of smaller states. Castañeda’s legal and political outlook, Quintana argues, remains ever relevant to debates on universalism, regionalism and power asymmetries in international organizations.

Roaming Charges in this issue pictures a moment on a Sunday afternoon in Washington Square, New York: two individuals immersed in their individual yet common realities.

In this issue’s Articles section, Eliav Lieblich asks whether states can use force to recover territory during prolonged occupation. Lieblich disentangles the implications of the permissive and restrictive approaches and the normative commitments required of each camp. He makes the case for an individualist sensibility that prioritizes the avoidance of human suffering over territorial integrity, arguing that the crux of such ‘wars of recovery’ lies in the tension between statism and individualism.

Exploring another polarity between states and natural or legal persons, Yohei Okada analyses how the distinction between acta jure imperii and acta jure gestionis influences the attribution of the conduct of parastatal entities to a state. For Okada, Article 5 ARSIWA has been read too narrowly as precluding the attribution of commercial acts of parastatal entities to the state. The article advances a different reading of that provision and describes the scenarios in which acta jure gestionis may be attributable.

In the next article, Filip Batselé unearths archival material from the 1950s and 1960s that sheds light on the lobbying for private foreign investors carried out by a little-known association: the Association for the Promotion and Protection of Private Foreign Investments. Batselé recounts how that group of lawyers and businessmen came together, with varying degrees of success, around the goal of influencing the laws of foreign investment protection.

The following article studies another attempt to influence law-making. Bruno Biazatti analyses the replication of the wording of existing treaties as a drafting technique, taking the International Law Commission’s Draft Articles on crimes against humanity as a case study. For Biazatti, the adoption of familiar formulae found in other legal instruments reflects a political choice of the Commission; the jury is out on whether states will back the ILC’s ‘copy and pasting’.

Closing the Articles section, Itamar Mann focuses on the struggle of Palestinian refugees. The exclusion clause in the Refugee Convention, Mann warns, is unfit for the unique situation of Palestinian refugees registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency. Placing the question in the broader context of the Palestinian fight for self-determination, the article invites us to reconsider the political foundations of refugee law.

The Last Page in this issue presents a poem by a Portuguese poet, Florbela Espanca (1894-1930), beautifully translated by Kay Cosgrove. A feminist spirit living in turbulent times, ‘To Be a Poet’, Espanca wrote, ‘is to condense the world into a single cry’.