This paper presents a genealogy of the passport in international law. For the most part, the origins of our contemporary mobility order are narrated from the vantage point of the grand principles of sovereignty, hospitality, and liberty. The nuts and bolts through which people access mobility – passports and visas – are generally understood to be the natural, inevitable, and fair by-products of these principles. This paper contributes to existing debates on the coloniality of international migration law by examining the universalization of the passport under the League of Nations. I argue that the universalization of the passport meant abandoning the old idea that the rights of free movement belonged to everyone and, instead, instituted a system that ranks human mobility based on national origins. Theoretically, it is proposed that attention to these “lowly” practices of mobility governance allows us to track the afterlives of race in the international order.

This article explores the terms “BRI dispute” and “BRI jurisprudence”. It undertakes a practical and theoretical analysis that considers whether “BRI disputes” have distinct and visible characteristics and are capable of being identified in a legal sense. This is important since practitioners – arbitration centres and law firms – use the term broadly and without specific criteria. By exploring the customary usage and the approach of legal scholars to the term, presenting examples of “BRI disputes” and examining their unique features, and constructing a theoretical approach (utilizing the concepts of ratione materiae, ratione loci, ratione temporis, and ratione personae; and considering the jurisprudence of the ICSID), this article moves from a broad to a narrow analysis to develop both a definition and a system of registration of “BRI disputes” for use by academics, practitioners, and policymakers.

This article examines the approaches taken by the Asian Development Bank Administrative Tribunal and the Administrative Tribunal of the Inter-American Development Bank Group in deciding discrimination claims. The article reviews the basic features of each tribunal before examining their jurisprudence on equality of treatment and issues of information disclosure in discrimination cases. Decisions to date have addressed claims of disparate treatment relating to various aspects of remuneration and benefits as well as allegations of arbitrary treatment vis-à-vis others similarly situated. A few cases have involved allegations of discrimination on the basis of sex/gender, one of several protected grounds in equality law. The number of judicial dissents in discrimination cases suggests that the tribunals have encountered some difficulty in handling them. The article points to a gradual but still incomplete approximation of the decisions of such tribunals to contemporary developments in discrimination law, and suggests a possible way forward.

The distinction between disputes of sea boundary delimitation and disputes over the existence of maritime entitlements was one key element of the legal argument that the Philippines brought forward against China in the Philippines v. China Arbitration. On the one hand, the distinction between delimitation and entitlement allowed the Tribunal to establish its jurisdiction on several Philippine submissions despite the jurisdictional exclusions of China's declaration under Article 298(1)(a)(i) of the Law of the Sea Convention. On the other hand, the Tribunal's finding about the lack of China's entitlements has important consequences. China and a number of lawyers objected to the jurisdictional separability of entitlement and delimitation. The aim of this paper is to discuss the question of whether a tribunal can establish jurisdiction on the existence of maritime entitlements in a context where jurisdiction on boundary delimitation is excluded and where a determination of entitlements has consequences for boundary delimitation.

This paper explores the legality of the land closure imposed upon the Gaza Strip by Israel. After having considered the area under occupation, the paper argues that the legality of the closure must be determined under international humanitarian law, international human rights law, the principle of self-determination of peoples, and the Israeli-Palestinian agreements. In the light of these rules, the arbitrary closure of the Gaza Strip should be considered illegal because it breaches the unity between the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and because it violates the freedom of movement of the local population. Moreover, the closure breaches the relevant rules pertaining to the transit of goods in occupied territory. The paper concludes that most of the violations caused by the closure affect peremptory rules which produce obligations erga omnes, so that any state in the international community is entitled to react under the law of state responsibility.

For any foreign investor, protection of their investment is a primary concern in host states. National legislations and BITs usually provide legal security to them so that they can exercise their desired economic freedom in host countries. Without legal safeguards for their investments, they will not be motivated to invest their capital further. Like other host states, generally, the national laws and BITs of Bangladesh provide significant investment protection guarantees. This paper will discuss how far the protection through judicial or arbitral settlement is established in the legal framework and BITs of Bangladesh. Dispute settlement mechanisms in Bangladesh, various ICSID cases involving Bangladesh, and conflicts between Bangladesh and foreign investors are discussed. The paper also covers the issues and challenges of judicial arrangements in Bangladesh, and findings show that dispute settlement arrangements in Bangladesh are not up to international standards and require significant development. Last, recommendations are provided for consideration.

This paper examines the use of a specific international legal fiction. It is claimed that a legal fiction was confirmed by the Tribunal in the South China Sea Arbitration (2016). The paper asks whether this is an effective legal fiction. The paper will argue that this is not so, pointing to the difficulties that the fiction necessarily creates. From this example, lessons may be learned of the phenomenon of legal fictions of international law generally, and, crucially, of their effectiveness.

In investment treaties, the self-judging security exception clause allows states to restrict the exercise of investors’ rights and protections provided for by such treaties during security emergencies. During the last decade, such a clause has been included in numerous investment treaties to support state positions vis-à-vis foreign investors. States consider that this provision gives them a very broad discretion to limit or derogate from obligations which arise under the treaty. In this article, after having identified the self-judging character of this clause, it will be demonstrated that such a clause does not affect the jurisdiction of the tribunal but requires the tribunal to apply the principle of good faith as the proper standard of review to interpret the elements of the clause, preventing states’ abuse of such a clause.

The establishment of the Asian Society of International Law (hereinafter “the Society”) may be characterized as symbolizing a fundamental change in history: the transformation from the West-centric world of the twentieth century to the multipolar and multi-civilizational world of the twenty-first. The Society’s establishment suggests the urgent need for those living in this multipolar world—international lawyers in particular—to enhance their ability to appreciate this changing reality and the normative responses to it. The Society could also be an important forum for achieving these aims.

Global society in the twentieth century was dominated by “Western” powers. In the field of international law, it was mainly the governments, media institutions, leaders, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), experts, and international lawyers of the Western nations that constructed, interpreted, maintained, and implemented the international legal order. For a long time, it was the major Western universities and the American Society of International Law (ASIL) that played a leading role in the field of the academic and professional activities of international law.

From around the end of the twentieth century, it became evident that Asian nations had again risen in the global arena. Japan took the lead and has remained the world’s second-largest economy since the late 1970s. Yet it is the resurgence of China and India as world powers that is of fundamental importance from the perspective of human history.

The relationship between international and domestic law in Indonesia is the subject of prolonged debate caused by the silence of the Indonesian Constitution on the choice between monism and dualism, which affects constitutional adjudication. This article discusses how the Constitutional Court engages with international law in its decisions and how the debate between monism and dualism is affected by it. It argues that the practice of the Court falls neither within the traditional scope of monism nor dualism but tends to be eclectic, which can be termed pragmatic monism. Here, the Court considers an international treaty part of domestic law upon ratification. However, its contents are only applicable if they are consistent with the Constitution, the highest law in the country. Nevertheless, such pragmatism is not without consequences where the consistency of the constitutional system as a whole is compromised for the instrumentality of its individual decisions on societal well-being.

Treaties are contractual instruments that may provide special rules of priority in case they conflict with other treaties. When a treaty does not provide such rules, however, priority is determined by the rules of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) and/or general principles of law. This article argues that both the VCLT and general principles of law do not provide an adequate solution to treaty conflicts. It suggests that the solution to treaty conflicts rests in a value-oriented reading of international law and the norms incorporated in treaties. Norms represent values and values represent interests or benefits for which international society requires protection. Conflicts of treaty norms are, therefore, conflicts of values that courts and dispute settlement bodies resolve by ordering a hierarchy of competing interests and protecting the most important interests in a given context.

This article proposes re-thinking the history of refugee protection in the Southeast Asia region, focusing on the post-World War Two period (1945–1979). It fills a gap in the literature on this period, drawing on archival material. It disrupts a narrative of “human rights exceptionalism” in Southeast Asia. First, it examines the small but powerful role of Southeast Asian states during the drafting of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. These states challenged colonial powers and asserted human rights. Second, it considers the role of key refugee-hosting states in Southeast Asia in developing—with other post-colonial states—regional standards to protect refugees under the auspices of the Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee, the Aliens Principles of 1961 and Bangkok Principles of 1966. Third, it places international and regional action in the domestic context by drawing on the example of Thailand's protection of Vietnamese refugees. It concludes that the approach in the post-WWII years points to an extended history of protecting refugees in Southeast Asia, and valuable lessons from the Global South for the region and beyond.

This paper aims to provide a comprehensive legal analysis, reminding the reader of the missing roles and potential of the the Gulf Cooperation Council [GCC]. Interstate disputes threaten the very existence of the GCC. Moreover, they call into question the GGC's mechanisms for co-operation and for ensuring the peaceful settlement of disputes. For instance, the GCC's Charter, commercial arbitration rules, and the Basic Law of the Economic Judiciary Commission all provide provisions for peacefully settling disputes between GCC Member States and their citizens. GCC states are also members of the League of Arab States [Arab League], another important regional organization with dispute settlement procedures. However, GCC and Arab League judicial and quasi-judicial mechanisms have not been invoked to date, arguably because the states prefer a diplomatic settlement. This paper reviews the GCC's mechanisms for co-operation and dispute settlement, referencing public international law to formulate recommendations to reform the GCC.