After ten full years of serving as one of the intrepid Editors of EJIL:Talk!, and twelve years of service to the European Journal of International Law beginning with my membership in the Scientific Advisory Board in 2013 to the Editorial Board in 2021, I am grateful to complete my service and rejoin the world’s already-all-too-visible college of international lawyers and international law professors, scholars, practitioners, and students of the Global North and Global South, that together must somehow continue to examine the role and salience of international law to humanity in these times of unrelenting challenge to the international rule of law. The pushback against the structures, institutions, and sources of international law as we know it is all too real on a daily basis, and for my part I will continue to do my work as a scholar, professor, and lawyer at Notre Dame Law School, directing our Human Rights LLM Program and our Global Human Rights Clinic, while also continuing my many years of quiet collaborations involving international law and the rule of law in both my birth country, the Philippines, and my academic and professional home, the United States. Both are living, as we all are, in “interesting times”.
One thing I will observe over the past decade of pushback against the Charter-based international system is that so much of the persistent objections to “globalism” or “cross-border” rules, treaties, and customary international law are premised, on a surface level, on the resistance of those who wish to wield power domestically and internationally to the exclusion of any notion of an international rule of law. So much of the scholarship I have been privileged to read and engage at EJIL:Talk! and the Journal over the last ten years addresses that initial threshold of resistance, between those that distort the interpretation of international law, or reject it altogether in the name of the return of the State and its domaine reserve. And indeed, in that sense, international lawyers, law professors, and students have so much to contribute to recognize, and harmonize our own vocabularies of what IS or is not the rule of law under international law treaties, customary international law, jus cogens, and general principles of law. Those, in my view, are the standard fissures of living, interpreting, implementing, applying, and enforcing Charter-based international law throughout 195 plus very different sovereign jurisdictions in the world.
However, 2025, in my view, is significantly different. I think these are times of deliberate abandonment not just of what ought to have been largely settled norms of international law since 1945, but also an outright repudiation by political majorities (and the leaders they enable) of the norms and institutions that have augured a relative stability that forestalled any World War III for the last eighty years. Much of it, of course, is not a perfect stability but one overriden by so many inequalities and unaddressed differing political, civil, economic, social, cultural, environmental, and ethical demands to be expected from a world population of 8 billion. The unaddressed inequalities and justifiably understandable demands accumulating everywhere over time make it all too easy for political leaders to reject the “invisible” enemy — whether it’s foreigners seen as enemy aliens rather than those who also possess the dignity and worth of human persons, global trading rules perceived to have eliminated domestic manufacturing jobs rather than actually leveling the playing field for all, foreign wars and foreign problems alleged to be a drain for the wealthiest democracies, rather than a shared responsibility to maintain international peace and security for all of humanity.
Long before most of us reading this were born, peoples of the United Nations were determined to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”, to “reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and nations large and small”, to “establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained”, and to “promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom.” Somewhere within the last eighty years, as international law expanded into every realm of human activity, the expectations of what this body of law could, and should do, for all of humanity, also ratcheted upwards accordingly. And every time those expectations are unmet — whether because we inhabit a horizontal system and not a verticalized system of world government, or the usual cracks of enforcement prove selective for some international law norms while omitting others —- more and more populations reject what international law can really do for them. Disenchantment can more easily grow towards repudiation. Both the politically astute as well as the well-meaning can take advantage of disenchantment to blame international law and the Charter-based system for all the ills that populations experience. In many ways, international law can end up being the easiest heat shield for failures in domestic politics.
Which is why, as I close my ten years at EJIL:Talk! and 12 years at the Journal, I maintain the same thesis I have ever had since the beginning of my own work as a scholar, practitioner, and professor of international law teaching students both in the Global North and the Global South. The same one that Hersch Lauterpacht himself said in his famous 1950 tome, International Law and Human Rights, where Lauterpacht essentially argued the centrality of human rights to the international legal system, and the dangers to international peace, security, and development so long as human rights lagged in the making, applying, and enforcing of international law. My version of this thesis simply argues that International Law Cannot Endure Without Human Rights, or what Myres McDougal argued many years ago as “inescapable interdependencies with respect to human rights.” Today’s pushback against international law is seeded from deep discontents over failures to realize human rights for all of humanity (never mind, of course, that domestic governments should have some responsibility for their own citizens). International Law has always been a fertile area for legal and juridical imagination, a fervent site for multiple contestations and polemical interpretations, but today’s many populations around the world that are voting for leaders that repudiate international law do not see tangibly what international law has effectively done for them, their felt circumstances of hardships, deprivations, or denial of opportunities to flourish, as well as their human aspirations for peace, prosperity, and dignity.
My own intellectual and moral project, after completing ten years of service to the Journal and EJIL:Talk!, is to contribute to investigating, testing, and applying the above thesis, in scholarship, in teaching, and in the practice of international law for its constituents, especially for so many who do not feel connected to the usual power centers of international law in The Hague, Geneva, New York, and elsewhere. The tremendous task of entrenching cooperation as a way of life not just between States, but between the actual peoples of the United Nations, to build peace, safeguard human rights, and realize a just development for all humanity needs all hands. Including mine.
Thankfully, ten years with the Journal and EJIL:Talk!, including the incomparable mentorship of Joseph H.H. Weiler and the generous fellowship of the most brilliant colleagues I admire in international law, has helped prepare me for what’s next. I look forward to continuing to read so many epic contributions to scholarship in the Journal and EJIL:Talk!, and contributing more from the frontlines of international law and human rights.
