The Articles section in this issue begins with a contribution by Anna Hood, Madelaine Chiam and Monique Cormier, which brings attention to international law open letter writing. They analyse the open letters that were written in the first three months after the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine conflict in 2022 and the Israel-Gaza conflict in 2023. They conceive of such open letter writing as a particular type of international legal practice serving three main purposes of advocacy, solidarity and public education.
The second article, by Taylor St John, Malcolm Langford, Yuliya Chernykh, Øyvind Stiansen, Tarald Gulseth Berge, and Sergio Puig, problematizes the common assumption of full compliance in investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS). Evidence shows a wide array of post-award behaviours of states. These behaviours, the authors argue, suggest that the ISDS compliance process can better be conceptualized as bargaining rather than states fulfilling their obligations under the ‘fixed standards’ set by the awards.
In the third article, Jason Webb Yackee tells the story of the 1963 French-Tunisian treaty, France’s first bilateral investment treaty (BIT). Drawing on archival research, Yackee observes that the negotiation of this 1963 treaty involved real bargaining on both sides, making efforts to build a workable postcolonial framework for mutual beneficial cooperation. The negotiation of this treaty hence stands in stark contrast with BIT negotiations of the 1990s and 2000s, where developing countries often accepted BIT texts from capital exporting countries without much question.
Closing the Article section, Hedi Viterbo and Yulia Ioffe critique the international legal principle of child protection, according to which young refugees should receive special protection due to their unique vulnerability and dependence as ‘children’. While not inherently harmful, the authors argue this principle constructs an age-based hierarchy of protection which in practice often deprives young refugees of their agency and renders adult refugees less deserving of protection.
This issue continues with the Critical Review of Governance section. In the first contribution, Diego Zannoni explores the debate leading to the adoption of the Declaration on Human Cloning at the United Nations General Assembly and the European legal framework on human cloning. He contends that reproductive cloning is globally prohibited, whereas therapeutic cloning is so far not unlawful on the international level and in Europe. In her article, Cecily Rose focuses on Article 57 of the United Nations Convention against Corruption on the return of stolen assets and the challenges this provision has faced over the last 20 years. Using the Global Forum on Asset Recovery as an example, Rose discusses options of formal law reforms and informal law changes to improve the effectiveness of assert return norms.
The Critical Review of Jurisprudence section of this issue features a contribution by Salvatore Caserta and Mikael Rask Madsen. Focusing on LGBTQIA+ rights and death penalty litigation in the Caribbean and East Africa, the authors argue that for such litigation to be impactful, three elements need to be aligned, i.e., new institutional opportunities, coordinated legal strategies to utilize existing legal avenues, and a societal momentum for the cause or at least the absence of strong counter movements.
Roaming Charges in this issue journeys back, perhaps a little nostalgically, to a pre-tech time when typos in a manuscript spelled trouble.
Finally, the Last Page features a poem by the 19th-century Bohemian-Austrian author, Adalbert Stifter, skilfully translated by Susan McClements Wyss.
