A reply to: Chorzów Factory – intellectual property and the continuity of international law in investor-state dispute settlement

The case involving the nitrate factory at Chorzów, Upper Silesia has been the subject of much academic commentary. Last year the intellectual property aspects of the case were explored in this journal. In this reply, I express doubts about whether the case involved the expropriation of intellectual property rights (IPRs) for two reasons. First, there are grounds to question the existence of IPRs. Second, even if there were IPRs, the Permanent Court of International Justice does not appear to have found that IPRs were taken. Instead, the case serves as a reminder of the importance of identifying the legal status of an IPR in the relevant territory when seeking to protect it under international law. * My thanks to Martyna Mielniczuk-Skibicka and Kacper Górniak. All errors are my own.

Ordering Institutions: The Judicial Function of the Permanent Court of International Justice in Relation to Interwar Organizations

The Permanent Court played a vital role in the emergence of the law of international organizations. Existing accounts of this development focus on the Court’s conception of organizations. This paper argues that this interpretation underappreciates the controversy regarding the performance of the Permanent Court’s judicial function and its place within the inter-war institutional order. Crucially, it is claimed that initially the Permanent Court adopted the perspective of an authoritative interpreter, limiting the scope for recognising the autonomy of organizations. However, the Court began to adopt a more restrained conception of its judicial function and recognised that international organizations possessed a form of compétence de la compétence. This recognition paved the way for a ‘law of international organizations’ to emerge, but, crucially, was not based on any revised understanding of what it meant to ‘be’ an international organization, but rather, on what it meant to ‘be’ an international court.

Re-Evaluating Triage in International Justice during COVID-19 – Complying with the Rule of Law?

This article addresses the challenges (and responses thereto) for those international institutions devoted to mandatory monitoring the individuals’ protection of fundamental rights during and after the COVID pandemic. It covers the practice of several of the main regional (European, Inter-American and African) judicial and quasi-judicial human rights bodies in a comparative overview with the UN human rights monitoring bodies and the International Criminal Court. The interesting medical metaphor of ‘triage’ (i.e., designing a system of priorities to maximize impact, during an emergency) is used to discuss the measures taken to preserve the rule of law, both in their internal functioning as well as in promoting the rule of law within national legal orders when monitoring the States’ compliance with international human rights obligations and guidelines about COVID-19. While overall, procedures in the different bodies were developed to ensure that the rule of law is maintained, which makes it easier to respond to similar crises in the future, the pandemic also sheds light on the need to revisit some substantive concepts in human rights law.

Identity of Roma women and processes of international and transitional justice

Among the women involved in international legal environments, there are women who are administrators of justice, and women who remain as recipients, consumers or petitioners of justice. The question of identity, be it national, cultural, ethnic, religious or otherwise may become crucial when positioning human beings in one side of justice or another. This article seeks to analyse the formation of identities and the characteristics of Roma women’s identity and specifically their roles in international justice together with some actual European political stances towards the Roma peoples. Part of the study will take into account the sequence of processes that take place from the appointment of international judges to the resolutions of the United Nations Security Council, and that lead to the granting of a certain place for women in the transitional/international justice scene. Nevertheless, there are also groups of women who hardly participate in the international legal scene and, although their role has historically been, and still is, reduced to being victims, their possibilities of action in the field justice are extraordinarily limited. This is the case of Roma women in Europe.

An Age-Old Question: Optical (A)llusions, (In)Decency, and (In)Justice in the Trial of Japanese War Criminals

Timing complicates all dimensions of post conflict redress. Moving too fast suggests prejudice. Going too slow delays accountability and closure. This paper challenges the temporal logic of international justice. The prosecution of aged defendants created aesthetical dilemmas for war crimes operations in post-World War ii Asia. The unsettling optical allusions of frail perpetrators in court — shadows of their former selves — left many observers conflicted: it looked indecent, it felt unjust and underwhelming. The unseemly punishment of weak defendants undercut prosecution attempts to brand perpetrators as monsters. Disappointed reporters and trial authorities fixated on the shabby dress, waning physique, and benign senescence of once-sinister villains. Few questioned the accused’s guilt. Many felt unnerved by the optics. Ultimately, this paper shows how the staging and performance of justice impacts a court’s effectiveness. Unrelenting accountability, bringing all war criminals to justice, feels right. Yet, the aesthetic complications of prosecuting aged accused may not be worth it.

Justice Model in Latin American Folklore

The present epoch is the time of intense international communication. Effective interaction of ethnicities demands, however, to construct the dialogue of cultures on the basis of justice. Moreover, we argue that local justice models need to take priority over the international justice model. Local justice models are reflected in folklore. In this article, we analyze Colombian, Peruvian, Venezuelan, and Bolivian ethnic tales of justice. The purpose of our research is to reveal and systematize justice models in Latin American folklore including contextual, general, private, evolutionary, demographic, historical, divine, ecological, restorative, formal, selective, procedural, and other justice models.