While China’s approach of re-territorializing the cyberspace is well known, this chapter argues that there is an emerging tendency of China expanding its regulatory power beyond territorial borders, which indicates a more spatially expansive notion of China’s digital sovereignty. This chapter examines this shift from territoriality to extraterritoriality in the conception and practice of China’s digital sovereignty by focusing on three recent regulatory initiatives, that is, the Personal Information Protection Law, the Data Security Law, and the order by the Ministry of Commerce on blocking unjustified extraterritorial application of foreign legislation and measures. From these initiatives, the chapter identifies two main approaches of broadening the spatial dimension of China’s digital sovereignty and argues that they reflect how the notion of digital sovereignty is developed to incorporate China’s changing geostrategic interests. This adaptation of China’s digital sovereignty can be compared to practices of the EU and the US to observe both contrasting trends and important regulatory emulations. The trend toward extraterritoriality, while conditioned by multiple internal and external factors, is likely to face important conceptual and practical challenges.

In fall 1945, Lieutenant Colonel William K. Evans, the US Army’s chief civil affairs officer in Taiwan, smuggled sixty kilograms of gold bullion that he confiscated from the Japanese Tenth Area Army and offloaded it on Shanghai’s black market, returning to the United States with $108,000 in cash (worth approximately $1.5 million today). The gold was supposed to go the Chinese Nationalist government. Although US military authorities found overwhelming evidence of Evans’ guilt and had recently sentenced another colonel to ten years in prison for a nearly identical crime committed in Tokyo, Evans walked away a free man after a protracted Sino-US diplomatic struggle and two mistrials in federal court. By examining the Evans case, this chapter sheds light on the transition from extraterritoriality and formal colonialism to America’s postcolonial model of using status of forces agreements (SOFAs) to exercise jurisdiction over US forces stationed abroad.

This chapter starts from the premise that secondary sanctions are invariably adopted to exert pressure upon foreign economic or financial actors operating in third states, with the intention to modify their conduct in alignment with the primary sanctions already imposed by the sanctioning state against the target state. As follows, due to their extraterritorial scope and their exceptional capacity to encroach upon the sovereignty of other countries, the legal status of secondary sanctions under international law is controversial. This contribution seeks to elucidate if secondary sanctions may amount to economic coercion and whether as a result these measures could constitute a breach to the principle of non-intervention. The chapter closes by exploring the potential avenues for regime interaction between the rules governing the exercise of jurisdiction by states and the principle of non-intervention in the context of secondary sanctions.

In 2019, the United States indicted Turkiye Halk Bankasi (Halkbank), a Turkish state-owned bank, alleging a multiyear scheme to evade US sanctions against Iran by using fraudulent transactions to transfer the proceeds of oil and gas sales to Iran. This chapter evaluates the charges against Halkbank under both US domestic law and customary international law. After briefly reviewing the charges against Halkbank and the US district court’s analysis of the extraterritoriality questions, the chapter considers the application of the US presumption against extraterritoriality, concluding that all the charges except for the bank fraud charges survive this analysis. The conclusion with respect to customary international law, however, is quite different. Under customary international law, the United States lacks jurisdiction to prescribe when its only connection to the foreign defendant is the clearing of transactions through banks in the United States. Because the International Emergency Economic Powers Act authorizes sanctions on financial transactions only when the person or property is subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, the sanctions regulations cannot lawfully be applied to Halkbank.

The growing range and changing nature of unilateral sanctions have seen the emergence of a new label of so-called ‘secondary’ sanctions, as opposed to the more traditional ‘primary’ sanctions. While there is no accepted legal definition of secondary sanctions, in essence, secondary sanctions restrict economic transactions between third countries which may be entirely lawful under the law of these countries. Their extraterritorial character gives secondary sanctions their distinctive and particularly controversial character. Secondary sanctions create inter-State tension and may possibly violate a number of public international law regimes. They may harm the politico-economic interests of third States and cause headaches for private economic operators, whose potential exposure to secondary sanctions complicates the already complex web of multi-jurisdictional norms governing their international business transactions.

The aim of this conceptual chapter is to define international secondary sanctions and to address the contemporary legal challenges they raise. It proposes to explain such complex legal mechanisms, to overcome the apparent definitional wanderings in their regard, and to identify concrete keys to tackle the legal problems encountered by public and private practitioners. To this end, the analysis begins with an explanation of the core concepts underlying secondary sanctions and focuses on the aim of (extraterritorial) secondary sanctions to extend their scope, what the author calls ‘the reach dilemma’. The unilateral and extraterritorial mechanics of secondary sanctions are then illustrated by three original figures, allowing the reader to grasp the complexity of the different levers involved. The study then addresses the additional difficulty arising from the apparent plurality of definitions of secondary sanctions and proposes an explanatory key enabling to retain only one working definition of secondary sanctions stricto sensu. Finally, the chapter goes on with the identification of the main difficulties currently facing public and private legal practices in this field and presents legal solutions that offer avenues for resolution, in the short, medium and long term.

The prohibition of the threat or use of force, enshrined in Article 2(4) of the Charter of the United Nations, is the most important principle in the charter, and the need for international solidarity through the collective action of third states is of the utmost importance when a flagrant violation of that principle occurs. After briefly introducing the case study of the 2022 Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, this chapter analyses whether the current customary legal regime on international responsibility provides for any legal obstacles precluding indirectly injured states from adopting secondary sanctions. In particular, the chapter analyses the use of the concept of ‘lawful measures’ in Articles 41(1) and 54 of Articles on the Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts. It also considers that the collective system of the United Nations should be conceived, according to these same provisions, as the preferred framework for cooperative action. The chapter finally argues that when the unlawful use of force reaches the level of an act of aggression third states that are indirectly injured should be able to react through secondary sanctions. These measures, if adopted when the United Nations Security Council is deadlocked, should be considered as lawful because their objective is to remedy the wrongful non-compliance of third states with collective obligations arising from a serious breach of jus cogens norms by the aggressor state.

The focus of Chapter 4 seeks to determine whether the dominant focus should be judicial or non-judicial. To that end, the manner in which the European Court of Human Rights has interpreted ‘jurisdiction’ under Article 1 of the ECHR in a representative sample of seminal cases pertaining to ‘grey zones’ is examined. The chapter highlights the inconsistency of Court practice, the manifestly inexecutable nature of many of the cases associated with grey zones and, consequently, the limits of the Court in affecting general or individual justice in practice in these regions. The chapter concludes by noting that effectiveness depends on looking beyond the Court.

This chapter re-inserts the (rethought) concept of territory into the legal-theoretical framework, offering a look at how this concept can be realised and might differently operationalise concepts such as sovereignty and jurisdiction. Taking the concept of sovereignty first, the chapter operationalises this concept as a bundle of legal rights, duties, etc. informed by legal realist methods and social constructivism. The chapter then turns to the concept of jurisdiction, problematising the ‘boundaries’ of and reterritorialising extraterritorial jurisdiction. The chapter offers an alternative to the ‘ownership’ and ‘exclusive’ model of legal rights, which otherwise has at its core a reified and flat territory. The final part explores actorhood, demonstrating how the spaces of international organisations can be understood as their territories. Taking as its starting point the possibility of territorial pluralism, multiplicity, and continuous (re)production, the chapter ends with an account of territories proliferating rather than diminishing. Taking the idea of reterritorialising seriously, it proposes a legal account of the relationship between actors and their spaces.

This chapter explores the extraterritorial application of the U.S. sanctions: namely, the ability of those sanctions regulations to reach non-U.S. actors or activities taking place outside of the United States. The chapter examines a recent trend towards increasing extraterritorial enforcement by the U.S. sanctions authority. In particular, the chapter discusses the objections of China to such extraterritorial application of U.S. sanctions laws. Of particular focus are Russia’s and China’s attempts to de-dollarize and resort to alternative financial networks to lessen the impact of these sanctions.

During recent decades, patent holders and implementers working within Standard Developing Organizations have successfully cooperated to develop new wireless standards that have benefited consumers all around the world. The standardization process has been successful because it has made all participants better off. The increased strategic use of jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction challenges by certain implementers to delay or avoid payment is threatening this successful process. In response, courts in various jurisdictions are moving to set global license terms. However, because some local courts are, or at least are perceived as, biased, licensors and licensees are maneuvering to influence which court ends up setting global FRAND terms (for example, by seeking anti-suit and anti-anti-suit injunctions). In this chapter, we explore the implications for the future of the standardization process of these developments. Specifically, we consider the implications of extraterritoriality when licensors and licensees belong to different jurisdictions and local courts may be biased in favor of local litigants. Our main concern is that current developments may lead to the fragmentation of global standards along geopolitical lines.

The North Pacific in the mid-nineteenth century was an oceanic borderland zone shaped by whaling and other extractive industries, and characterised by the rapid circulation of animals, people, commodities and capital. It was also a thoroughly imperial space: while Japanese, Pacific Islanders and white ‘beachcombers’ all worked aboard whalers, only the latter could leverage their citizenship to secure extraterritorial protection from imperial powers.

The history of the Bonin (J: Ogasawara) Islands illustrates this well. Until 1830 the islands had only the most fleeting history of human habitation, yet by 1863 they had emerged as a vital provisioning hub for the whaling fleet, populated by Native Hawaiians, Pacific Islanders and Anglo beachcombers. When the Tokugawa government began colonising the islands, the beachcombers pointedly refused to naturalise as Japanese citizens, and secured diplomatic backing from their respective consulates in Tokyo. In doing so they frustrated Japanese attempts to assert territorial sovereignty over the Bonins for a generation.

This chapter demostrates that the ambiguities of wartime neutrality in Macau continued to haunt China’s relations with Portugal in the post-war years. Five interconnected issues relating to Portuguese neutrality evidence China’s post-war quest for justice and recognition: the re-establishment of regular diplomatic contacts, the handling of Japanese property, the extradition of suspects of war crimes and collaboration, the abolition of extraterritoriality and critiques of neutrality in calls to return Macau to Chinese rule. These issues raised questions about the meaning of justice and the legitimacy of who got to wield it. In its relations with a small and relatively weak European colonial power, China sought to affirm its new post-war international status. However, this process was constrained by resistance to the Nationalists’ anti-imperialist goals in South China and by the changing fortunes of Nationalist power as the Chinese Civil War unfolded.