Do International Organisations Play Favourites? An Impartialist Account

The recent turn of politics and philosophy to serious appraisals of international law is welcome news for politics, ethics and law. Politics can offer us rich description of the international landscape – the actors and their policies, conflicts and approaches to overcoming them; and political and moral philosophy can produce reasoned prescription for devising a just world order. But international law is a critical bridge between them, for law, with its grounding in the institutional arrangements devised by global actors, provides a path to implementing theories of the right or of the good. Just as scholars of politics have realised that their descriptions must include the norms and decision-making processes of international law, so scholars of international justice are taking account of the norms already institutionalised within the international order. Ethical discourse must understand these institutions, for they both place constraints upon and offer opportunities for carrying out the solutions to ethical problems that philosophers derive. Such an understanding is key not only to making international ethics stronger within philosophy, but to making it convincing to those concerned with operationalising ethical theory – political scientists, legal academics, governmental and non-governmental elites and the educated public. Beyond institutions, the connection between international law and ethics is also tied to international law\u27s own claim to morality. As Andrew Hurrell has put it, ‘the ethical claims of international law rest on the contention that it is the only set of globally institutionalised processes by which norms can be negotiated on the basis of dialogue and consent, rather than being simply imposed by the most powerful’

Between Minimum and Optimum World Public Order: An Ethical Path for the Future

Among the most significant contributions of policy-oriented jurisprudence to our understanding of international legal process is its identification of minimum and optimum world public order as the overarching goals of international law. Minimum public order in its essence refers to the global state of affairs with limited recourse to unauthorized violence to solve disputes, while optimum public order is synonymous with a world in which human dignity is maximally protected. These two concepts, augmented by other pairings now second-nature to us (for example, authority and control, and myth system and operational code), have also permeated—in the latter case, germinated in—the scholarship of Michael Reisman. From early writings on the legitimacy of sanctions against Rhodesia to more recent scholarship about the limits of self-defense or international criminal law, Reisman has been navigating the shoals of minimum and optimum public order, clarifying past trends of decision and offering prescriptions for norms and institutions that will advance both of these causes

International law and political philosophy: Uncovering new linkages

Despite a common agenda of normative analysis of the international order, philosophical work on international political morality and international law and legal scholarship have, until recently, worked at a distance from one another. The mutual suspicion can be traced to different aims and methodologies, including a divide between work on matters of deep structure, on the one hand, and practical institutional analysis and prescription, on the other. Yet international law is a key part of the normative practices of states, has a direct effect on state behavior, and, as a methodological matter, can contribute to good theorizing on matters of international ethics. Recently, philosophical work has demonstrated a greater engagement with the moral aspects of international law. One strand of scholarship has treated the rules of international law as a proper subject for philosophical inquiry. Another has used international legal rules to support moral arguments about aspects of the international order. Future dialogue and cooperation would benefit both fields, in particular on the challenges to global cooperation from nationalism and on strategies for allocating responsibilities among global actors for rectifying global harms.Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147868/1/phc312564.pdfhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/147868/2/phc312564_am.pd

Introduction

The articles in this symposium issue of the Michigan Journal of International Law represent the product of a historic and path-breaking conference held at the University of Michigan Law School in February 2007. The two-day meeting brought together an extraordinary array of scholars and practitioners to examine closely the relevance of international law for the gathering of intelligence by states. Although this long-neglected topic has gained increased relevance since the use of more controversial intelligence-gathering methods by the United States as part of its global war on terror, many of the legal issues are as old as the craft of intelligence itself

The Law of Occupation and UN Administration of Territory: Mandatory, Desirable, or Irrelevant?

Governments and international organizations as well as academic commentators have remarked upon the similarities and differences between occupation of territory by States and administration of territory by the United Nations. Although formal administration of territory by the United Nations has been limited to a small number of cases, the possibility of future revival of this practice warrants consideration of the relevance of the law of occupation (hereafter LO) to this phenomenon. This paper attempts to sketch out the major issues in an attempt to guide the experts in their discussion

Business

This chapter seeks to expose some of the divergences between doctrine and reality, and to suggest ways of understanding the field that take proper account of business. It does so first by examining the roles and goals of business entities with respect to international environmental law. It then examines how international law has accommodated the place of business in environmental policy with respect to two key issues: (1) corporations as the target of legal obligations; and (2) corporations as participants in the process of international environmental law, particularly with respect to law-making and implementation. I conclude with some thoughts regarding a reconceptualization of the doctrine

Accountability and the Sri Lankan Civil War

Sri Lanka\u27s civil war came to a bloody end in May 2009, with the defeat of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) by Sri Lanka\u27s armed forces on a small strip of land in the island\u27s northeast. The conflict, the product of long-standing tensions between Sri Lanka\u27s majority Sinhalese and minority Tamils over the latter\u27s rights and place in society, had begun in the mid-1980s and ebbed and flowed for some twenty-five years, leading to seventy to eighty thousand deaths on both sides. Government repression of Tamil aspirations was matched with ruthless LTTE tactics, including suicide bombings of civilian targets; and for many years the LTTE controlled large parts of northern and eastern Sri Lanka. The war\u27s last phase was characterized by a large intensification of violence from September 2008 through May 2009, as the government deployed an impressive military force against LTTE-controlled areas by land, sea, and air. In the process, its armed forces attacked civilians and hospitals, and denied food and medicines to the population; the LTTE, for its part, refused to let civilians under its control cross to the safety of government-held areas. As a result, thousands of civilians in the north were killed and injured, and hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes and eventually interned in government camps. Nearly the whole LTTE leadership was killed in the process. International organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and foreign media had little access to the conflict zone. The government took credit internationally for its success in defeating a terrorist movement and won a huge majority in the next election. In such a scenario, is it possible to devise strategies to hold accountable those from both sides who committed abuses against civilians? This Current Development reviews the efforts by international actors to address accountability for the civilian deaths and injuries during the final stages of the conflict. It examines the reactions of the United Nations to the war; the work of the secretary-general\u27s Panel of Experts on Accountability in Sri Lanka; and the follow-up to that report culminating in the passage of a resolution on Sri Lanka in the Human Rights Council in March 2012. My goal is to highlight the key issues of international law that have arisen and the approach taken by the UN system. The Sri Lanka case shows that, despite an impressive set of legal norms in place to deal with atrocities such as those committed in this conflict, the infusion of politics and the limitations of unprepared institutions can seriously delay prospects for accountability

Review of \u3cem\u3eHuman Rights: Between Idealism and Realism\u3c/em\u3e

For centuries, moral philosophers have regarded ethics and justice in the international plane as part of their domain. The move from the personal to the societal or national to the global seems effortless. In recent years, philosophers in ethics have devoted considerable attention to the ethical significance of nationality and patriotism, asking whether an impartial morality permits better treatment of an individual’s co-nationals; while those in politics have revisited issues of international justice through, for instance, works on human rights and just war theory. These two bodies of work both address what constitutes a just world and what role the individual should play in furthering it. They correspond in many ways to the interactional versus institutional conceptions of morality and justice identified by Thomas Pogge

The War on Terrorism and International Humanitarian Law

My focus today is on the broad question of the so-called war on terrorism and how it fits within the framework of the rules of international humanitarian law. Are these laws applicable? There have been a variety of claims since September 11th that humanitarian law needs some kind of revision. Some making this claim assert that the current legal regime is too generous to terrorists, while others insist that it is too generous to governments. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has even convened various groups of experts to discuss this issue and the assumption among many has been that the law is inadequate. My thesis today, however, is that international humanitarian law as currently developed does provide an adequate framework and that major revisions for it are premised on a variety of misconceptions about that law. I want to suggest four misconceptions about international humanitarian law and why understanding those will, I hope, convince you that the overall framework does not require major revision

Labeling Mass Atrocity: Does and Should International Criminal Law Rank Evil?

This essay concerns mass atrocity, not the kind that happened on September 11th, but an older kind when governments and those under them and supported by them killed innocent civilians on the basis of their ethnicity, on the basis of their politics, on the basis of their religion, or other traits of the group. These acts, crimes against humanity and genocide, were criminalized in the period after World War II by the International Military Tribunal and then by the Genocide Convention. These were very, very important steps forward in international criminal law, but the result of the post-war period was, in effect, two international criminal prescriptions, one through custom and one through treaty, and for two different crimes. The customary law crime was the crime against humanity, now codified more or less in the treaty establishing the International Criminal Court. The treaty-based law crime was the crime of genocide as set forth in the Genocide Convention of 1948