Dear reader,

In looking at the collection of papers in this volume, an impression of a certain eclecticism cannot be avoided. We have articles on public international law, European human-rights law, legal history, and various aspects of Estonian law, but also, for example, issues in Ukrainian law are dealt with. Moreover, while most of the articles are in English, some key papers are in German, which in times gone by was the lingua franca of the Baltic intellectual universe. Although the substantive themes of this edition of Juridica International are inevitably varied, it seems to me nevertheless that the diverse legal domains and questions all are connected with the expectations that we as lawyers and citizens have for law – be it international, regional, or domestic. Christian Tomuschat’s programmatic article on the current state and future of public international law is connected with a festive event that we celebrated at our university on 1 December 2016, when Professor Tomuschat received an honorary doctorate from the University of Tartu. In this capacity, he has joined the ranks of other distinguished individuals who have become honorary doctors in the field of law here: Boris Meissner (1996), Heinrich Mark (1998), Peter Schlechtriem and Thomas Wilhelmsson (2002), Wilfried Schlüter (2003), Tarja Halonen (2004), Christian von Bar (2007), Werner Krawietz (2008), Erik Nerep (2011), and Joachim Rückert (2014). The question of international law’s future is inevitably linked to the expectations we hold for that law. Professor Tomuschat demonstrates how international law became universal and how this has influenced expectations of it. Of course, the higher the expectations are, the easier it is to fall short of them. When the case load of the European Court of Human Rights became too heavy on occasion, some people said that the Court had become a victim of its own success. In this issue, Judge Julia Laffranque reflects on ethical foundations of, and expectations for, European human-rights law and its interpretations. Legal history, in turn, reminds us that the issue of expectations of law is an age-old one. Ideas from natural law have lived in an uneasy relationship with pure legal positivism. Especially in dictatorships, law does not correspond to ethical standards characteristic of democracies. In some cases, law has even become a tool of outright repression. The Radbruch Formula, known from the history of legal debate in Germany, has not lost its topicality. What are the expectations for national law? We usually expect best practices and legal models – to the extent that these can be established – to be followed. We expect legal certainty and a certain rationality and logic behind the law. Yet law can be likened to Estonia’s capital city, Tallinn, which according to an ancient legend will never be ‘ready’: it can never be complete. Expectations for law are particularly high in countries in transition, such as Ukraine. The University of Tartu (formerly Dorpat) had important links to universities in Ukraine already in the 19th century, and now we keep our fingers crossed that Ukraine will be able to pursue its own strong statehood based on democratic values. What are the expectations for legal scholarship? Since the readers of legal writings are educated in jurisprudence, we all expect to become more enlightened, to find clarification for things that we were not aware of or that we knew less about. If this volume of Juridica International succeeds with that in its readers’ eyes, it has done well enough

Hard Memory, Soft Security: Competing Securitisation of the Legacy of Communism in Eastern Europe

This work was funded by HERA (grant no. MSHRG10039)Non peer reviewe

Soviet Genocide? Communist Mass Deportations in the Baltic States and International Law

This publication is with permission of the rights owner freely accessible due to an Alliance licence and a national licence (funded by the DFG, German Research Foundation) respectively.The present article deals with international law problems that have arisen in the process of legal clarification of the state crimes committed during the Soviet occupation in the three Baltic states. Following the restoration of their independence in 1991, the Baltic states have sought to establish the historical truth about the mass crimes committed during the Nazi and Soviet occupations – Estonia's International History Commission recently published its first report which is analyzed in this article. Moreover, the courts in the Baltic states have convicted deporters of 1941 and 1949 for crimes against humanity and/or genocide. By discussing different definitions of ‘genocide,’ the author attempts to answer the question whether the general context of the Stalinist mass repressions in the Baltic states permits to qualify the occupant's policy as ‘genocide.’Peer Reviewe

Russland und das Völkerrecht: Einige Widersprüche

Russlands Völkerrechtsverständnis ist paradox: Die Regierung spricht viel über die Bedeutung völkerrechtlicher Normen, wird jedoch in Ländern wie der Ukraine und Georgien als Verletzter ebendieser Normen wahrgenommen. Russlands Völkerrechtsverständnis ist durch einige Besonderheiten gekennzeichnet, die einerseits auf die Geschichte des Landes als Großmacht, andererseits auf die relative Schwäche des öffentlichen Rechts als Einhegungsinstrument der Exekutive zurückzuführen sind. In diesem Beitrag werden einige Aspekte diskutiert, die Russlands heutige Einstellung zum Völkerrecht erklären könnten

'Memory Must Be Defended': Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security

This article supplements and extends the ontological security theory in International Relations (IR) by conceptualizing the notion of mnemonical security. It engages critically the securitization of memory as a means of making certain historical remembrances secure by delegitimizing or outright criminalizing others. The securitization of historical memory by means of law tends to reproduce a sense of insecurity among the contesters of the ‘memory’ in question. To move beyond the politics of mnemonical security, two lines of action are outlined: (i) the ‘desecuritization’ of social remembrance in order to allow for its repoliticization, and (ii) the rethinking of the self–other relations in mnemonic conflicts. A radically democratic, agonistic politics of memory is called for that would avoid the knee-jerk reactive treatment of identity, memory and history as problems of security. Rather than trying to secure the unsecurable, a genuinely agonistic mnemonic pluralism would enable different interpretations of the past to be questioned, in place of pre-defining national or regional positions on legitimate remembrance in ontological security terms

Identity and integration of Russian speakers in the Baltic states: a framework for analysis

Following a review of current scholarship on identity and integration patterns of Russian speakers in the Baltic states, this article proposes an analytical framework to help understand current trends. Rogers Brubaker's widely employed triadic nexus is expanded to demonstrate why a form of Russian-speaking identity has been emerging, but has failed to become fully consolidated, and why significant integration has occurred structurally but not identificationally. By enumerating the subfields of political, economic, and cultural ‘stances’ and ‘representations’ the model helps to understand the complicated integration processes of minority groups that possess complex relationships with ‘external homelands’, ‘nationalizing states’ and ‘international organizations’. Ultimately, it is argued that socio-economic factors largely reduce the capacity for a consolidated identity; political factors have a moderate tendency to reduce this capacity, whereas cultural factors generally increase the potential for a consolidated group identity