This article discusses the East Mediterranean Gas Forum (EMGF), a regional energy organisation formed in 2020. It highlights the organisation’s significance in promoting cooperation in the East Mediterranean energy sector but notes the absence of a robust legal framework, governance structure and binding rules. The lack of mechanisms for enforcing decisions among members is also a concern. To address these shortcomings, the article proposes the adoption of a regional energy treaty.

The suggested treaty holds the potential of transforming the EMGF into a potent and legally binding energy organisation. By establishing a comprehensive legal foundation, the treaty could foster energy cooperation, promote sustainable energy initiatives, and create a secure investment environment, thereby stimulating economic growth across the Mediterranean region. Moreover, implementation of the treaty could play a crucial role in ensuring energy security within the East Mediterranean. It has the capacity to help in mediating and resolving disputes concerning maritime boundaries, transit and political issues that pose threats to the stability and effectiveness of the EMGF.

For a regional energy treaty to be effective, it should encompass provisions concerning transit, trade, investment and environmental protection. The inclusion of decision-making bodies and robust dispute settlement mechanisms is essential to encourage investment, facilitate unhindered transit and consolidate the stature of the EMGF as a pre-eminent energy organisation.

The notion of infrastructure has recently featured prominently in international legal scholarship. The ambition behind the turn to infrastructure in international legal theory is comparable to other large attempts to conceptualize the discipline. Yet, against the backdrop of work in the humanities and social sciences, theoretical engagement with infrastructure is still nascent in the legal discipline. In this Article, we build on another recent development in international legal scholarship—the turn to “materiality”—to articulate a systematic theory of infrastructure in international law. At the center of our study is the case study of the cruise ship. Studying cruise ships and their legal and political environment in detail, we introduce three conceptual building blocks through which we develop a more comprehensive theory of infrastructure: Platform, object and rupture. Although we focus on cruise ships, the theory of legal infrastructure that we offer is applicable to a wide array of industries and issues.

This Article provides the outline for a conceptual framework focusing on legal infrastructures, comprised of socio-material assemblages and entangled legal normativities that both enable and constrain human societies. Section A introduces the growing transdisciplinary field of infrastructural studies, which employs the notion of infrastructure as a tool for analyzing the constitutive relationship between society and essential material structures. It then draws out the analytical conjunction of law and infrastructure in the role ascribed to law within existing applications of infrastructural studies and the nascent engagement with infrastructural theory within the legal discipline itself. Part II develops a conceptual framework on legal infrastructures, outlining three avenues for how thinking infrastructurally may yield new perspectives on the dynamic relationship between law, social practices, and socio-technical materiality; (a) legal infrastructures as socio-material formations that generate societal effects (b) legal infrastructures as schemes of social practice that recursively entangle to produce new configurations, and (c) legal infrastructures as distributing norms across transnational and regime boundaries.

What factors explain compliance with monetary damages awarded by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)? States comply with the payment of monetary damages at higher rates than other forms of reparation. However, the higher compliance rate belies the significant variation in time to compliance with the payment of monetary awards. We identify three case-level characteristics that explain this variation: size of awards, number of victims, and victim identity. We test our hypotheses utilizing original datasets on compliance with monetary damages and case characteristics in IACtHR judgments through 2019, and find support for all three factors on time to compliance.

International law began as a discipline concerned with the goal of peace, seen as the ideal state of relations between States, focusing on the potential for peaceful settlement of disputes, arms control and disarmament, and the prevention of war. International humanitarian law (IHL) emerged as the first significant development in international law addressing issues of peace and security. The subsequent development of international criminal law (ICL) following World War II has enabled the criminal prosecution of war crimes (serious violations of IHL) as well as crimes against the peace, crimes against humanity and genocide. This article argues that IHL, as it was developed to regulate the conduct of war (jus in bello) as a means of preventing unnecessary suffering, should be considered as separate yet integrally linked to the pursuit of international criminal justice as part of transitional justice in the context of jus post bellum, defined as “the set of norms applicable at the end of armed conflict … with a view to establishing a sustainable peace”. The article analyzes existing scholarship and emerging ideas about the relatively old yet underdeveloped concept of jus post bellum, and what this concept means in practice since the rapid increase in international interventions in peacebuilding and transitional justice in non-international armed conflicts. Applying the author's theory of transformative justice along with jus post bellum principles to the case study example of Cambodia, the paper discusses the complexities, uncertainties and apparent contradictions of establishing a “just peace” that builds on, yet goes beyond, the intersecting norms and practices of IHL and ICL. The article concludes by proposing the need for a radical reconceptualization of jus post bellum in order to support a more sustainable, transformative and emancipatory peacebuilding agenda.

The West Bank, also referred to as Judea and Samaria, has been subject to belligerent occupation since 1967, and its legal framework is grounded primarily in international law. This legal foundation of belligerent occupation emanates from the international law of occupation, which regulates the legislative, judicial and executive powers of the occupying state in the occupied territory. However, the utilisation of international law in adjudicating criminal matters within military courts in this region is sporadic. The underlying reasons for this practice call for inquiry and prompt a reconsideration of the optimal configuration of the legal regime.

This article contends that despite a recent uptake in integrating international law into military court decisions, its effectiveness in addressing criminal issues within these courts is limited. Moreover, in most cases presented before military courts, international law lags behind domestic legal doctrines, including Israeli criminal law. Despite its overarching authority, international law falls short of providing a pragmatic solution to the challenges confronted by military courts. Consequently, these courts are compelled to turn to alternative legal sources. The article proposes an integrated model, advocating reliance on international law for fundamental, constitutional-level issues while deferring to the Israeli criminal justice system for specific practical criminal matters.

Mapping of human rights abuses and international crimes is an increasingly common tool to evidence, preserve and visualise information. This paper asks, what does rights-informed mapping in the context of mass graves look like? What are the rights concerned and allied goals, and how might these practicably apply during a pilot study? The study offers an analysis of the goals and benefits espoused to accrue to mapping and documentation efforts, as well as an explication of rights arising when engaging with mass graves. Our findings underscore the imperative of understanding the full ramifications of the applicable context, in our case the life-cycle of mass graves. This will bring to the fore the rights engaged with the subject as well as the challenges with data points, collation and reporting as experienced in a pilot (Ukraine) where realities on the ground are not static but remain in flux.

An (ongoing) interrogation of colonial wrongdoing is important for debates on decolonisation, restorative justice, racial and gender equality and global political and socio-economic equality. This article presents a theoretical study of colonialism’s legal-political injustices and aims to (re)turn the discussion on colonialism to the field’s most powerful insight, i.e. that of of epistemic violence and injustice. This article also suggests that the reach of this historical injustice went much further than the politics of autonomy, usurpation of territorial rights, political disenfranchisement and resource appropriation. To address the question of colonialism’s distinctiveness as a political mission, which has been discussed in recent debates within analytic philosophy, it argues that colonialism’s epistemic injustice, which denied the very existence and the traditions of the colonised, is the foundational and distinctive feature of colonialism as a political system and which drives its continued impact to this day.