Suchergebnisse

Charles Covell considers the poltical thought of Thomas Hobbes in relation to the tradition of international law, and with the intention to challenge the reading of Hobbes as the exponent of the realist standpoint in international thought and practice. The relation of Hobbes to international law is explained through attention to the place that he occupies among the modern secular natural law thinkers, such as Grotius, Pufendorf, Wolff and Vattel, who founded the modern system of the law of nations.

Since the birth of Louise Brown in 1978, the first human baby resulting from in vitro fertilisation (IVF), developments in reproductive medicine have opened up new opportunities to solve problems related to sterility/infertility and to avoid the transmission of serious genetic diseases to offspring. This article evaluates some challenges to human rights protection arising from medically assisted procreation (MAP), with particular reference to artificial insemination from a donor (AID) and preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). It analyses the regulation of MAP at the international, regional and domestic level. Specific attention is paid to two landmark judgments of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) on MAP (S.H. v. Austria and Costa and Pavan v. Italy), with a special focus on the interpretation of the concept of family and private life contained therein and on the effects of the ECtHR rulings on the Italian legal order. It concludes that national legislation concerning MAP should be minimal, i.e. should afford substantial freedom and autonomy to the couples in their procreative choices, in accordance with their right to respect for private and family life.

On the surface, the two books under review seem to have little in common. The Bonnitcha/Poulsen/Waibel (BPW) book, written by two legal academics and a political scientist, provides a balanced, fact-grounded account of international investment agreements (IIAs) and investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). This is the "international treaty regime" in that book's title which the authors argue needs to be distinguished from the broader "international regime complex" that their book explicitly does not address, namely the number of other international instruments that at least incidentally also protect foreign investments (including, for example, political risk insurance, tax treaties, certain World Trade Organization agreements, and certain human rights treaties like the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)) (p. 7 and Figure 1.2). As one of the encomiums on its back cover page suggests, the BPW book seeks to answer the fraught competing contentions of defenders and critics of the regime that all too frequently generate "more heat than light." Their book dispassionately synthesizes the available legal, economic, and political literature relevant to understanding the investment treaty regime's oft-proclaimed "legitimacy crisis." It seeks to supply lawyers needing political context and political scientists needing legal knowledge with the unfiltered facts required to assess whether such a "crisis" exists and, if so, what the ways forward might be.

AbstractThis article takes a critical look at the development of international humanitarian law (IHL), from its early codification in the Hague and Geneva Conventions to the present day. It examines why and how IHL develops – through treaty, custom, interpretation and soft-law instruments, as well as the influence of jurisprudence and other branches of law. In doing so, it highlights some of the distinctive elements of IHL that set it apart from other bodies of law and explains how these elements influence IHL development. Turning to the present, it addresses some of the key arguments commonly heard against attempting any further development of IHL, by answering the following three key questions: Does IHL need to develop further? If so, how can this be achieved? And what are the prospects for such development in the near future? In answering these questions, the article argues that IHL will continue to develop in many ways, and that while the current environment does not appear propitious for new legally binding norms of IHL, they continue to be both necessary and possible.

In the last decade, there has been a turn to history in international humanitarian law and its accompanying fields. To examine this historization and to expand the current scope of scholarship, this book brings together scholars from various fields, including law, history, sociology, and international relations. Human rights law, international criminal law, and the law on the use of force are all explored across the text's four main themes: historiographies of selected fields of international law; evolution of specific international humanitarian law rules in the context of legal gaps and fault lines; emotions as a factor in international law; and how actors can influence history. This work will enhance and broaden readers' knowledge of the field and serve as an excellent starting point for further research