International Law & World Order: Weston's & Carlson's Basic Documents V.I.14 ILA Draft Articles on Marine Pollution of Continental Origin (without comments) (26 August 1972)

Author(s):  
Patrick Sze-lok Leung ◽  
Bijun Xu

The First Sino-Japanese War (1894–95) has been perceived as a sign of a new East Asian power order, but the legitimacy of the war has yet to be clarified. The Japanese foreign minister Mutsu’s Kenkenroku shows that the reasons claimed by Japan were only pretexts for its ambition to put Korea under its control. The 1885 Convention of Tianjin, which was used to justify the Japanese behaviour, needs to be reinterpreted. The Chinese reaction can be understood by exploration into Confucianism, which opposed wars between equal peers. Meanwhile, the Western powers which invented and developed international law were self-interested and did little to prevent the war. The incident shows that international law, empowered by the strong states, failed to maintain peace efficiently in the late nineteenth century.


2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 67-72
Author(s):  
Daria A. Sedova

In the entire history of mankind, a large number of acts of violence and aggression have been committed. Over the past 50 years alone, there have been more than 400 interstate and intrastate conflicts that have claimed the lives of millions of people. Increasingly, there has been an urgent need to protect the violated rights of individuals. The idea of creating a single international body for the protection of human rights has been discussed more than once. For the first time, the idea of creating an international judicial body was expressed in 1948 by the UN General Assembly after the Nuremberg and Tokyo trials at the end of World War II, which issue has been discussed at the United Nations ever since. However, efforts to create such a mechanism have not been successful, despite the need for a permanent criminal court to prosecute and punish those who commit the most serious crimes. In 1998, this idea was realized. The International Criminal Court (ICC) has sought ways to establish a world order with a fair resolution of conflicts. It has long been recognized, the verdict of the Nuremberg Tribunal noted, that international law imposes duties and obligations on specific individuals as well as on the state. [] Crimes against international law are committed by people, not by abstract categories, and only by punishing individuals who commit such crimes can the provisions of international law be respected. To date, the ICC is successfully coping with the task of punishing those persons or groups of persons who have committed the international crimes listed in the Rome Statute. It would seem that the balance between good and evil has been found. The crime has been committed and the criminal punished. But it is important to note that the procedural issues have not been resolved as well as that of punishing criminals. An urgent matter today is the status of defenders of the accused in international criminal proceedings. This question requires not only a doctrinal, but also a practical understanding.


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