Two Weeks in Review – 14 – 27 July 2025

In the last two weeks, a range of topics were covered in EJIL Talk!, from international criminal law and human rights, to the rule of non-intervention and the sources of international law. We also have the latest installment of EJIL: the Podcast! out now for your enjoyment.

Special attention has been given to two Advisory Opinions on climate change: one by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the other by the International Court of Justice. Posts on this topic have been published, and will continue to trickle in in the upcoming weeks to scrutinize specific legal aspects of each opinion. 

Below is a summary of the posts published over the course of the last fortnight, organized by theme.

The Climate Change debate and two Advisory Opinions

Following the long-awaited issuance by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights of its Advisory Opinion on the Climate Emergency (AO) on 3 July 2025, posts by Juan Auz, Eoin Jackson and Aoife Nolan continued the conversation that was already ongoing about the AO on this blog. 

Auz not only provides a break down of the Opinion, but also contextualizes the AO as a distinctive Global South contribution to the climate change debate. While recognizing the limited jurisdiction of the Inter-American Court and the likelihood of its bold opinion reasoning across other regions of the world, Auz commends the Court for taking into account a material analysis of inequality into the climate legal discourse, and its naming of groups particularly affected, such as Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant and peasant communities, and impoverished people. 

Jackson zooms into how the Inter-American Court AO addresses the responsibility of corporations for climate change. He argues the AO is an overall useful development in the intersection between business and human rights and corporate climate accountability. The Court’s approach is that companies have obligations to take climate action, and that this is concretised and articulated through appropriate state regulation. The Court is thus ambitious, in his view, as it discusses not only obligations of states, but also concrete suggestions on how states must uphold the obligations of non-state actors, especially corporations that are large greenhouse gas emitters, under domestic law.

Nolan’s post is dedicated to the treatment of future generations in the Inter-American AO. She commends the Court’s thorough engagement with the rights of future generations in the opinion, that permeated its text in several points and that went further than ever before on the issue. She is critical, however, of some important gaps and omissions that she sees as missed opportunities to engage with challenges of the future generations question, such as those related to democracy, access to courts, and discrimination and equality rights.

Yet another groundbreaking decision was rendered over the last fortnight in international law and climate change: the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change. The AO was issued on the 23rd of July 2025.  We already have two interesting contributions, and posts commenting on specific aspects of the ICJ AO will continue to make their way to the blog over the upcoming weeks.

Justina Uriburu and Julian Arato focus on the obligations aspect of the AO, namely how the Court treated the sources of international law governing climate change and, crucially, how these sources interact. They cover customary international law, lex specialis, systemic integration, and presumptions. They conclude that the ICJ AO provided much needed scaffolding around the architecture of states’ obligations with regards to climate change, and that the Court’s use of the “systemic integration” tool was particularly notable, and likely to have a ripple effect beyond the confines of this Opinion. 

Miles Jackson and Federica Paddeu address specific issues of state responsibility in their post. They break down the Court’s approach to issues of attribution, causation, and the erga omnes (partes) character of the primary obligations, as well as the remedy of guarantees of non-repetition. They conclude that the Court placed great emphasis on generally applicable rules, and that it continued to crystallise the International Law Commission’s  work on state responsibility, systematising a foundational theme and helping construct the international legal system further.

International Criminal Law

Edward Haxton interviewed Judge Graciela Gatti Santana, President of the United Nations Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals. Their conversation covers a wide range of topics, including the decreasing size of the IRMCT, the role of historical record-keeping of the tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the case of former IRMCT judge Lydia Mugambe who was recently convicted of modern slavery offences in the UK.

Hannah Lobel and Nema Milaninia break down the agreement between the Ukraine and the Council of Europe, signed in June 25, 2025, to establish a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression against Ukraine. The post discusses the tribunal’s design, with particular attention to immunities, jurisdiction, the definition of the crime of aggression, and proceedings in absentia. The authors conclude by stating that the tribunal design allows for pursuing accountability for the crime of aggression in a specific context, in light of the principle of legality and existing international standards of due process.

International Dispute Settlement

Wenyan Fang in her post discusses the setting up of the International Organization for Mediation (IOMed). She discusses how IOMed is the first permanent inter-governmental dispute settlement organization dedicated to mediation, and how its functioning and goals fit within a larger Chinese approach to dispute settlement. She characterises this approach as more flexible and diplomatic than more judicial styles of dispute settlement, and seeks to go beyond simplistic explanations that characterise the Chinese approach as merely “sovereignty-conscious”. She then concludes that China’s advocacy for mediation is slow and steady, and may be reshaping international dispute settlement “like water wearing through stone”.

International Court of Justice

Joseph Klingler and Ariella Katz Miller address the jurisdictional possibilities of Iran bringing a case before the ICJ against the US for the assassination of general Qasem Soleimani that occurred during the first Trump Administration, in 2020. They propose the use of a previously untapped legal basis, the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Crimes against Internationally Protected Persons, as a jurisdictional avenue for Iran before the ICJ. The aforementioned Convention contains a compromisory clause in its Article 13(1), granting ICJ jurisdiction, and both parties have signed and ratified it without reservations. They discuss the issue of Soleimani’s status as an “internationally protected person” under the Convention and customary international law, potentially as a member of a “special mission”, and the interaction between the Convention obligations and IHL. 

Andreas Giorgallis provides detailed commentary on the Land and Maritime Delimitation and Sovereignty over Islands (Gabon/Equatorial Guinea) concerning their land and maritime dispute as well as the issue of sovereignty over the islands of Mbanié/Mbane, Cocotiers/Cocoteros and Conga. He gives an overview of the dispute and of the Court’s findings, and teases out some key points of contention revealed in judges’ individual opinions. Whereas he is critical of some of the limitations the Court had in resolving highly technical disputes such as this, he argues the proceedings had an important role in creating room for diplomacy and peaceful settlement.

Principle of Non-Intervention

In a post addressing the 50% tariffs imposed by Donald Trump against Brazil, I argue that the US has breached the rule of non-intervention, in addition to its obligations under international economic law. Trump’s letter justifying the tariff increase against Brazil was motivated primarily by his desire to put an end to the prosecution of former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, and halt judicial and legislative efforts to regulate social media companies, such as Trump’s “Truth Social” and Elon Musk’s “X/Twitter”. Trump’s letter imposing the tarrifs fulfills all the elements of “coercion-as-extortion”, a breach of the principle of non-intervention. 

Sources of International Law 

Dmytro Soldatenko discusses the two current topics before the International Law Commission related to the sources of international law: the second reading of conclusions on general principles of law, and the first reading of conclusions on subsidiary means for the determination of rules of international law. He argues that in both projects the ILC faces a dilemma of balancing state consent as the underpinning of its sources methodology, and more accurately representing the reality of how the ILC’s work is used in practice.

Self-determination

Stephen Allen and Jamie Trinidad analyze and criticise recent developments on the issue of Western Sahara here. They discuss how Morocco’s claim to sovereignty of the disputed region is becoming increasingly entrenched by the (in)action of the UN and the so-called “‘Group of Friends of Western Sahara”, composed of US, UK, France, Russia and Spain. This entrenchment is, in Allen and Trinidad’s argument, contrary to Morocco’s obligations under international law to ensure Sahrawi self-determination. 

Law governing Cyber Operations

Kubo Mačák provides a critical review of the work of the “UN Open-Ended Working Group (OEWG) on security of and in the use of information and communication technologies”‘s latest report. While acknowledging the report’s role in building consensus around thorny cyber activity issues, Mačák defends that the Report is too general and does not reflect states and experts’ numerous efforts to consolidate and publicise their opinions on international law governing the subject. The report could have gone further, in his view, in teasing out common understandings that do exist amongs different camps, despite existing differences. 

Use of force

Matthias Goldmann argues, in his post, that there is a direct correlation between current patterns of breaches of international law, especially on the use of force camp, and a decline in democracy in the Global North. He highlights instances of double-standards in the treatment of some conflicts over others by the German government and the EU, in particular. He also discusses the clash of views between two camps, that he calls “universalist” and “sovereignist“. He defends that upholding breaches of international law abroad has a “boomerang effect”: it returns home in the form of recrudescing anti-democratic and anti-rule of law sentiments. Goldmann concludes by saying that for democracies and constitutions to be respected at home, international law must be respected as well.

EJIL: the Podcast!

Do not miss our latest episode of EJIL: the Podcast!, “The Scourge of War“, in which Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb are joined by Tom Dannenbaum to discuss two sets of issues. First, the legality of the use of force by Israel and the United States against Iran, and specifically its nuclear programme, from the standpoint of the jus ad bellum. The discussion turns around the possible justifications that Israel can give for its use of force, including the notion of stopping an imminent armed attack by Iran. Second, the recent judgment of the Grand Chamber of the European Court of Human Rights in the interstate case of Ukraine and the Netherlands v. Russia, which deals with various aspects of the war in Ukraine, including the downing of the MH17. In particular, the contributors analyze the Court’s approach to extraterritorial jurisdiction and to the network of relationships between the European Convention, international humanitarian law and the jus ad bellum.

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