UNCLOS: many a slip

The 1960 UN Conference on the Law of the Sea failed to reach agreement on the breadth of the territorial sea and fishing limits, with India, Chile and Ecuador playing decisive roles. The road to the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) was littered with failed treaty-making conferences. In 1930, a League of Nations conference broke up without a decision over territorial waters. In 1958, a UN conference failed to agree on the breadth of the territorial sea and associated fishing limits. In 1960, a follow-up UN conference to decide these two outstanding questions collapsed

Systematic review of the relative social value of child and adult health

Objectives: We aimed to synthesise knowledge on the relative social value of child and adult health. Methods: Quantitative and qualitative studies that evaluated the willingness of the public to prioritise treatments for children over adults were included. A search to September 2023 was undertaken. Completeness of reporting was assessed using a checklist derived from Johnston et al. Findings were tabulated by study type (matching/person trade-off, discrete choice experiment, willingness to pay, opinion survey or qualitative). Evidence in favour of children was considered in total, by length or quality of life, methodology and respondent characteristics. Results: Eighty-eight studies were included; willingness to pay (n = 9), matching/person trade-off (n = 12), discrete choice experiments (n = 29), opinion surveys (n = 22) and qualitative (n = 16), with one study simultaneously included as an opinion survey. From 88 studies, 81 results could be ascertained. Across all studies irrespective of method or other characteristics, 42 findings supported prioritising children, while 12 provided evidence favouring adults in preference to children. The remainder supported equal prioritisation or found diverse or unclear views. Of those studies considering prioritisation within the under 18 years of age group, nine findings favoured older children over younger children (including for life saving interventions), six favoured younger children and five found diverse views. Conclusions: The balance of evidence suggests the general public favours prioritising children over adults, but this view was not found across all studies. There are research gaps in understanding the public’s views on the value of health gains to very young children and the motivation behind the public’s views on the value of child relative to adult health gains. Clinical Trial Registration: The review is registered at PROSPERO number: CRD42021244593. There were two amendments to the protocol: (1) some additional search terms were added to the search strategy prior to screening to ensure coverage and (2) a more formal quality assessment was added to the process at the data extraction stage. This assessment had not been identified at the protocol writing stage.</p

"Crimes against peace" and international law

The Nuremberg Judgment on the leaders of Nazi Germany proclaimed ‘crimes against peace’ – the planning and waging of aggressive wars – to be ‘the supreme international crime’.  This charge was premised on two innovative ideas: that aggressive war was a crime, and that individuals could be held responsible for it. Although heralded as an historic milestone at the time, it turned out to be a transient legal anomaly.  At the Nuremberg Tribunal, the number of acquittals, coupled with the relative leniency of the sentences, indicated the judges’ unease about convicting on the basis of ‘crimes against peace’.  At the Tokyo Tribunal, some judges questioned the validity of the charge and filed dissents.  Legal observers, meanwhile, were outspoken in their criticisms, and argued that it was an ex post facto enactment, selectively applied. Aside from retroactivity and selectivity, the main difficulty arose from the internal contradictions within the charge itself, which rendered it unsustainable as a component of international law.  On jurisdiction, it enhanced the sovereignty of nations by protecting them against aggression, while simultaneously undermining sovereignty by subjecting leaders to international law.  On enforcement, while judicialising punishment after the event, it simultaneously de-legitimised both aggression and attempts to prevent it.  These weaknesses were confirmed by the failure of ‘crimes against peace’ to become part of customary international law. If the Rome Statute is amended to include ‘crime of aggression’ within the International Criminal Court’s operative remit, these latter problems are likely to occur.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Rocking the Boat: The Paracels, the Spratlys, and the South China Sea Arbitration

On July 12, 2016, an Arbitral Tribunal constituted under Annex VII to the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea found overwhelmingly in favor of the Philippines in its dispute with the People's Republic of China over maritime claims and other issues in the South China Sea. This piece appraises the decision in light of the events leading up to the current controversy. To investigate the source of the conflict, one does not have to go back very far. In 1974, during the final stages of the Vietnam War, China ejected South Vietnam from the Paracel Islands-a group of tiny maritime features in the South China Sea claimed by both nations. After a classic "weekend war, "China tried to dampen down the affair by swiftly releasing the prisoners and refusing to be drawn into an international debate. Within days, though, there was more activity, when South Vietnam dispatched forces to occupy five features in the Spratly Islands, a larger group further to the south of the South China Sea. During this period, South Vietnam, the Philippines, and Taiwan all engaged in the fortification of their respective features reinforcing garrisons, installing military hardware, building runways, and shooting at interlopers. The militarization of the Spratlys had begun, and well before China, the focus of the current arbitration, established a physical presence on the reefs in the vicinity. By drawing on these earlier events, examined through the lens of United States'diplomatic correspondence of the time, it is possible to both construct a legal path to the arbitration based on the parties' claims to the Spratlys, and critically appraise the Tribunal's reasoning on its jurisdiction over the Philippines' claims against China

The Tokyo Trials

Of the postwar trials convened in Tokyo to try Japanese leaders for crimes relating to the war in Asia and the Pacific, by far the longest and most far-reaching was the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (“Tokyo Tribunal”)