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Abstract
This article assesses the increasingly important and diverse role undertaken by a range of 'soft-law' counter-terrorism instruments since September 2001. It starts from the proposition that states increasingly use soft-law standards to regulate in the counter-terrorism, countering violent extremism and preventing violent extremism arenas. The article identifies a broad range of soft-law instruments and assesses their normative and practical importance for states. In parallel, the analysis identifies and maps a range of new institutions and entities producing such norms, paying particular attention to their membership, legal basis, terms of reference and working methods. The role and importance of these new institutions is broadly addressed. The article argues that soft-law production in counter-terrorism has weakened human rights protections across the globe and provided cover for sustained rights violations in multiple national contexts. As a result, human rights norms are not meaningfully included in the creation and implementation of these norms. The article pays particular attention to the lack of pathways for human rights standards to be meaningfully integrated, accounted for and benchmarked in the creation of counter-terrorism soft law. It identifies the ways in which new institutions have inter alia been established precisely to avoid the normative and institutional application of these standards to the counter-terrorism norm creation process. The article starts to trace the movement of some 'soft-law' norms to hard-law standards, illustrating the dense relationship between 'hard' and 'soft' law in the counter-terrorism arena.

Abstract
Emergencies are often unforeseen and unexpected phenomena which require immediate action. Emergencies can be political, social, economic, sanitary and ecological in nature. While acknowledging that a range of different kinds of emergencies require governments to respond by law, this contribution is focused on the ways in which the protection of human rights must be ensured in situations when terrorism, violent-extremism and counter-terrorism can create emergency conditions resulting in emergency responses by states. I particularly address the challenges of sanitary and health emergencies occasioned by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The development of an exceptional court : the history of the American military commission / David Glazier -- Military commissions in historical perspective : lessons from the United States - Dakota war trials / Carol L. Chomsky -- Contemporary law of war and military commissions / Gary D. Solis -- Military commissions and the paradigm of prevention / David Cole -- Prevention, detention, and extraordinariness / Fiona de Londras -- In defense of federal criminal courts for terrorism cases in the United States / Gabor Rona and Raha Wala -- Exceptional courts and the structure of American military justice / Stephen I. Vladeck -- Exceptional courts in counterterrorism : lessons from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) / William C. Banks -- The law working itself pure? The Canadian experience with exceptional courts and Guantánamo / Kent Roach -- Vicious and virtuous cycles in prosecuting terrorism : the Diplock court experience / John Jackson -- Terrorism prosecution in the United Kingdom : lessons in the manipulation of criminalization and due process / Clive Walker -- Trying terrorists : the Israeli perspective / Emmanuel Gross -- Exceptional or not? An examination of India's special courts in the national security context / Jayanth K. Krishnan and Viplav Sharma -- The right to a fair trial in an extraordinary court / David S. Weissbrodt and Joesph C. Hansen -- Approaches and responses of the UN human rights mechanisms to exceptional courts and military commissions / Alex Conte -- Exceptional courts and the European Convention on Human Rights / Steven Greer -- The legitimacy deficit of exceptional international criminal jurisdiction / Yuval Shany

The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the ensuing 'war on terror' have focused attention on issues that have previously lurked in a dark corner at the edge of the legal universe. This book presents a systematic and comprehensive attempt by legal scholars to conceptualize the theory of emergency powers, combining post-September 11 developments with more general theoretical, historical and comparative perspectives. The authors examine the interface between law and violent crises through history and across jurisdictions, bringing together insights gleaned from the Roman republic and Jewish law through to the initial responses to the July 2005 attacks in London. Three models of emergency powers are used to offer a conceptualization of emergency regimes, giving a coherent insight into law's interface with and regulation of crisis and a distinctive means to evaluate the legal options open to states for dealing with crises

The article begins by addressing the contribution and limits of postcolonial studies to the understanding of colonialism; in particular, it critiques the field's fixation on the discursive to the detriment of the material reality of colonialism. We then examine the intellectual history of transitional justice (TJ) as a field and a practice and itemize some of the criticisms made of its shortcomings, not least in relation to colonial harms. These harms are considered in detail through the specific example of colonialism in Ireland. We focus on the noticeable absence of the concept of colonialism from contemporary deliberations and practices of transition in relation to the Northern Ireland conflict. Finally, we interrogate the ability of TJ in the postcolonial period to adequately make amends for colonialism, again focusing on the Irish case, concluding that while there are major obstacles in such a task, especially in relation to "hard" measures, there are also some promising possibilities, particularly as regards "soft" measures. The lessons learnt are applicable to a range of other transitional sites grappling with postcolonial legacies.