An International Legal Extravaganza in the Indian Ocean: Placing the Indian Ocean Tuna Commission outside the Framework of FAO

2007 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 485-515
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Director General ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Treaty Law ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
International Legal Personality ◽  
International Character ◽  
Do So

AbstractThe Indian Ocean Tuna Commission (established by treaty under Article XIV of the FAO Constitution) has tried to amend its own Agreement to place itself outside the framework of FAO in order to deal more effectively with "fishing entities". However, its attempts to do so have been thwarted in part by the refusal of the Director-General of FAO to circulate proposed amendments. This is evaluated and found to be contrary to Article 76.2 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, which refers to the international character of a depositary and the need for impartiality. In addition, the Secretariat of FAO has asserted that it can be achieved only by a cumbersome treaty process involving termination of the present treaty and Commission and establishing a new treaty and new Commission. The paper evaluates the arguments for this position in the light of international treaty law, including the practice in other treaty bodies. It concludes that the arguments in support of such a convoluted approach are fundamentally flawed. Finally, the paper considers briefly whether the Commission has international legal personality, and concludes that it does.

scholarly journals The Cognitive Psychology of Rules of Interpretation in International Law

AJIL Unbound ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 115 ◽  
pp. 258-262
Author(s):  
Anne van Aaken
Keyword(s):  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
International Law ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Treaty Law ◽  
Psychology Perspective ◽  
The Law ◽  
Biases And Heuristics ◽  
The Way

While Articles 31 and 32 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) prescribe the rules of interpretation for international treaty law as “disciplining rules,” the rules of interpretation themselves are understudied from a cognitive psychology perspective. This is problematic because, as Jerome Frank observed, “judges are incurably human,” like everybody else. I submit that behavioral approaches could provide insights into how biases and heuristics affect the way judges and other interpreters use the VCLT rules.

scholarly journals The “local / global” dichotomy as a fundamental concept of the acquisition of international legal personality by a territorial community

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-66
Author(s):  
Denis Bobrovnik
Keyword(s):  
Local Level ◽  
World Order ◽  
Physical Nature ◽  
Fundamental Concept ◽  
Special Role ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
The Social ◽  
International Legal Personality

The article examines the “local / global” dichotomy as a fundamental concept of the acquisition of international legal personalityby a territorial community.It is argued that such a dichotomy is based on the trend of internationalization of the constitutional order of states and the cons -titutionalization of modern international law, which lead to close ties, interaction and mutual penetration of national constitutional andgeneral international law.It is proved that the global / local dichotomy, which is designed to characterize the spatial systemic characteristics of modernsocial interaction, is not only a methodological basis for the concept of “globalization”, but also an important conceptual and theoreticalguideline of the concept of “localization”, emphasizing the special role of local government and territorial community. in borrowingand transforming the factors of globalization to the local level of existence of society.Emphasis is placed on the fact that given the clearly insufficient level of research and doctrinal support and provision of the global/ local dichotomy, it is characterized by an appropriate level of illogicality and contradiction – due to diametrically opposed authorialpositions, which sometimes leads to completely different definitions and understandings of global and local.The analysis of the causes and context of the formation of the dichotomy on the example of the territorial community shows that“local” and “global” are not oppositional components of the world order, but are an integral part of both this order and each other, they are mutually determined and complementary – resulting in the growth of community participation in global processes, which in factforms their respective partial international legal personality, which finds its fixation in international treaty law.It is pointed out that the tendency to solve the global / local dichotomy is the emergence of the phenomenon of glocalization,which not only chaotically but then organically combines the parametric features of both states, but also accordingly “tightens” theimportance and role of the territorial community. at the local level of society in its existence and functioning, at the global level of mea -surement, which accordingly justifies giving them international legal personality.It is summarized that the example of the existence and functioning of territorial communities in their historical, geographical,resource and other dimensions shows that it is due to changes in the conditions of functioning of “local” appears “global”, and it iswithin the “global” there is currently any which is “local”, actively influencing it –so people, their groups, associations, their socialenvironment – is “local” in its physical nature, but the social practices of these subjects in the conditions of modern permanent changesare transformed into “global”.

scholarly journals The Individual in International Law: ‘Object’ versus ‘Subject

2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 132
Author(s):  
Solomon E. Salako
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Criminal Liability ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
Investment Protection ◽  
The Status ◽  
Municipal Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
International Legal Personality

There is uncertainty about the status of the individual in international law. The traditional positivist doctrine of international law is that States are the sole subjects of international law and that the individual is the object. The contemporary approach is that the individual is an original subject of international law and the owner of international individual rights. This approach relies for its justification on areas of international law such as investment protection treaties, intellectual property treaties, international human rights law, individual criminal liability in international law and Vienna Convention on Consular Relations where the individual has been brought into contact with international law. The objects of this article are: (i) to assess critically the various areas where the individual has been brought into contact with international law with a view to showing that the individual is not a full subject of international law; and (ii) to show that insofar as the individual possesses a limited locus standi in international law and a limited array of rights, that is, limited legal capacity, the proffered existence of an international legal personality of the individual is not only superfluous but also confuses international legal personality which involves the capacity to perform legal acts in the international sphere with legal personality in municipal law.

The Oceans Become Global

2021 ◽  
pp. 16-38
Author(s):  
David Bosco
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Long Range ◽  
15Th Century ◽  
Ocean Governance ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Inherent Nature ◽  
The Right ◽  
Do So

Aspects of ocean governance have ancient roots, including early anti-piracy campaigns and basic rules for maritime commerce. Sovereign rulers periodically attempted to control ocean space but usually lacked the means to do so. As Spain and Portugal mastered the art of long-range seafaring in the 15th century, however, they attempted to divide the world’s oceans between them, an effort that still stands as one of the most ambitious attempts to divide up the oceans. During that period, Portugal tried to exclude outsiders from the Indian Ocean and asserted the right to control all shipping in the area. Portuguese claims prompted objections from other European powers and set the stage for the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius to articulate the doctrine of a “free sea,” based on what he saw as the inherent nature of the oceans. While it faced several rebuttals, Grotius’s conception of the oceans mostly prevailed.

Cartographies of the Untimely in Postcolonial Historical Realism

2019 ◽  
pp. 29-64
Author(s):  
Greg Forter
Keyword(s):  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Indentured Servitude ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
Do So

Barry Unsworth’s Sacred Hunger and Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies develop cognitive-affective maps of empire that reveal its totalizing ambitions. They deploy realist techniques to do so while displaying an intense self-consciousness about such techniques’ limitations. The maps they draw link the Atlantic world (and slavery) with the Indian Ocean (and indentured servitude). This angle of vision moves the historical novel’s frame of reference beyond both the nation and the mono-oceanic paradigms that have emerged as alternatives to nation-based understandings. Finally, and drawing especially on the work of Dipesh Chakrabarty, the chapter shows that the novels retrieve from historicist time the inassimilable, heterotemporal residues of utopian alternatives to the colonial, which draw upon while radically refashioning “premodern” and pre-secular modes of affinity.

Circulations of Law: Cosmopolitan Elites, Global Repertoires, Local Vernaculars

2014 ◽  
Vol 32 (4) ◽  
pp. 773-795 ◽  
Author(s):  
Iza Hussin
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New York ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
The Indian Ocean ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
English Speaking World ◽  
Point Of Departure ◽  
Do So

Bernard Cohn once called the imperial point of view the “view from the boat”. There were other boats as well.In 1893, the sovereign state of Johor adopted the OttomanMedjelle (Meḏj̱elle-yi Aḥkām-i˚ḥʿAdliyye, the civil code applied in the Ottoman Empire since 1877), being the only state among the Muslim sultanates of the Malay Peninsula to do so. In 1895, Johor promulgated a Constitution(Undang-Undang Tubuh Kerajaan Johor), being the first state in Southeast Asia to do so. This article takes this moment, of the intersection of two types of law from quite disparate sources, as a point of departure for tracing the pathways by which law made its way from one corner of the globe to another. Taking nineteenth century Johor as our vantage point provides a new optic for mapping law's geography and temporality and for exploring the logics of law's itinerancy and its locality. The travels of law were always material, and often embodied; on ships sailing the Indian Ocean between Johor and Cairo were diplomats, merchants, pilgrims, and lawyers faced with new pressures and new possibilities; in the growing traffic in letters and newspaper reports between London and New York, Tokyo and Constantinople, were debates about empire and culture, power and authenticity; in personal relationships made possible by the technologies of nineteenth century cosmopolitanism, were similarly worldly dramas of deception and demands for justice. In the 2 short years between the adoption of theMedjelleand the Constitution in Johor, the sultan of Johor, Abu Bakar (1833–1895), typified this mobility and interconnection. In his travels across the Indian Ocean to the Near East and Europe; in his appearance in diplomatic communiques in London, Constantinople and Washington D.C.; in his prominence as a figure of exoticism and intrigue in the newspapers and the courts of the English-speaking world, the sultan not only embodied law's movements in a figurative way, he was also himself a key carrier of the law, and one of its signal articulators.

The Use of International Treaty Law by the Court of Justice of the European Union

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 ◽  
pp. 121-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jed ODERMATT
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
International Law ◽  
Vienna Convention ◽  
The European Union ◽  
International Treaty ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
European Approach ◽  
Court Of Justice ◽  
Treaty Law ◽  
Judicial Reasoning

AbstractThe Court of Justice of the European Union has on numerous occasions employed the provisions of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties, to the extent that they represent principles of customary international law, in its judicial reasoning. At first glance, the Court’s use of the Vienna rules demonstrate fidelity towards international law; it can be seen as contributing to the ‘strict observance and the development of international law’. Upon closer examination, however, one finds that the Court applies these rules in a fashion that often deviates from the way in which other courts and bodies have applied the same principles. This article examines how the Court has used international treaty law, arguing that the Court often employs a novel, ‘European’ approach to certain principles. While the Court is free to apply treaty law in a manner it believes to be appropriate, the extent of this divergence risks undermining the integrity and uniform application of the Vienna rules.

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