Nuclear Laws for Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Energy

The development and utilization of nuclear energy is one of the greatest achievements of the 20th century. It has greatly enhanced the ability of humanity to understand and shape the world and had a significant impact on the development of technology and civilization. In the 21st century, the United Nations (UN) has developed the “Millennium Development Goals” and the “2030 Sustainable Development Goals” to promote a comprehensive solution to the world’s social, economic and environmental issues. To this end, nuclear energy offers unique advantages, but the associated risks and challenges of its further development and utilization must be addressed. Nuclear law is a powerful tool for regulating its development and responding to those risks and challenges. The Chinese Government has always developed nuclear energy for peaceful purposes in a safe and innovative way. At the Nuclear Security Summit in 2014, President Xi Jinping proposed adhering to a rational, coordinated and balanced approach to nuclear security and promoting a fair, cooperative and win–win international nuclear security regime. This not only summarizes China’s experience in establishing a nuclear legal framework and developing nuclear industry, but would also strengthen international nuclear governance and promote nuclear energy to better benefit humanity. The international community should fulfil international obligations strictly, implement national responsibilities effectively, and jointly maintain the UN focused international system and international legal order, contributing to the realization of the common goal of “Atoms for Peace and Development”.

Großraum: teoretyczne uzasadnienie hitlerowskich podbojów czy nowy porządek prawnomiędzynarodowy?

The doctrine of “Great Space” is one of the basic conceptual categories in Carl Schmitt’s extensive and often inconsistent political and legal thought. Studying the extensive research on the life and work of this lawyer, carried out by representatives of various sciences and political orientations, we can get the impression that in comparison with decisionism, the characteristics of a receivership and sovereign dictatorship, looking for analogies between religious and political and systemic concepts referred to as political theology, the figures of the enemy and friend accompanying the Concept of the Political, Großraum remains the least thoroughly investigated. There are at least a few reasons for this, but the most important seems to be the reluctance that is constantly present in many circles, resulting from the strong relationship of this concept with the period of accession to the NSDAP and the conviction that its purpose is only to justify Nazi aggression during the Second World War. Meanwhile, the research problem is much more complex, and the Nazi episode alone in Carl Schmitt’s over 97-year-long life does not provide unambiguous conclusions among the authors who deal with his thought in their scientific works. The main purpose of this article is to determine whether the Großraum in fact justifies the Nazi conquests, or whether it may also be legitimate to claim that it is a vision of a new international legal order drawn up by a lawyer closely scrutinizing the surrounding political reality. An attempt to answer this question should be preceded by thorough considerations quoting the jurist’s attitude to the development and the hitherto nature of public international law. In this respect, it is crucial to analyze the breakdown of the ius publicum Europaeum, refer to the essence and purpose of the American Monroe doctrine, as well as thoroughly examine the concept of Großraum, which presents the researcher with a difficult task requiring its verification both politically and legally. The presented analysis will therefore take into account the historical, political, and legal levels and will implement the belief in the comprehensive nature of the issue under study. The final part of the article will include an analysis of the consequences of Großraum doctrine that led to the internment of Schmitt and the trial where the most important is his interrogation by Robert M.W. Kempner. All these issues will bring us closer to establishing the true meaning of the “Great Space” theory and shed new light on research devoted to Schmitt, dubiously described as the “crown jurist of the Third Reich”.

Seismic Shifts: The COVID-19 Pandemic’s Gendered Fault Lines and Implications for International Law

The Covid-19 pandemic and related shutdowns created seismic shifts in the boundaries between public and private life, with lasting implications for human rights and international law. Arriving just as the international legal order was wobbling in the wake of a populist backlash and other great challenges, the pandemic intensified fault lines of marginalisation and state action, amplifying the forces that had already left the liberal international order in crisis and retreat. This article examines the pandemic’s impacts on the international legal order through a gendered lens. It argues that in the short-term, the pandemic has reinforced public-private divides in international law, reinvigorating previous debates over the role of the state in protecting its people from harm. It argues that in the long-term, these developments threaten to unravel the most recent gains in international law and global governance that have supported and expanded the recognition of human rights to marginalised groups. Left unaddressed, this unraveling will further entrench such divides and contribute to the further retreat of the liberal international order. Examining these fault lines and their implications can help us re-imagine a post-pandemic international legal order that offers more protection for human rights, even as multilateral institutions and cooperation sputter or fail.

Protecting concessionary rights: General principles and the making of international investment law

This article engages with the history of international investment law in the first half of the twentieth century. It traces how international lawyers inscribed their vision of an international legal order protecting private property of Western companies against attempts at nationalization in the wake of socialist revolutions and the decolonization of large parts of the world. The article focuses on the role of ‘general principles of law as recognized by civilized nations’ as building blocks for an international legal order today called international investment law. Rather than describing a direct line between contemporary standards of protection and the invocation of general principles, the article develops conditions of possibility for the emergent field of international investment law. These conditions are located both in arbitral practice, as well as in international legal scholarship of the early twentieth century. Based on the analysis of such arbitrations over disputes resulting from concession agreements and scholarly writings in the interwar period, the contribution draws out the modes of authorization upon which the legal claims advanced by international lawyers rested. At the heart of the vision were ideas of ‘modernity’, ‘civilization’, ‘equity’, and ‘justice’ that enabled a hierarchization of difference, locating Western claims to legality above rivalling claims of socialist and ‘newly independent’ states. These ideas ultimately constituted the paradox of a ‘modern law of nature’ that claimed timeless universality while authorizing the ordering of foreign property in line with Western conceptions of modernity.

Occupancy, Land Rights and the Algonquin Anishinaabeg

This article is about Indigenous territorial title and land rights, and specifically those of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation. In 1983, the Algonquins of Pikwàkanagàn, residing in the province of Ontario, petitioned the Crown to recognize Algonquin territorial title and rights to 36,000 square kilometres of their natal homelands in the Ottawa River watershed. With negotiations beginning in the early 1990s, an Agreement-in-Principle was developed and ratified in 2016, the penultimate step to the largest modern treaty in Ontario's history. In this article, we examine the argument for moral rights to territory, not in terms of the Canadian or international legal order, nor even through examining the documents and voice of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg, but through the lens of an argument that has been advanced as the basis of the international territorial rights of states. We argue that the justifications for state rights territory—grounded in the considerations that ensue from an analysis of occupancy groups—provides a stronger claim to territorial jurisdiction and title in the case of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg Nation than the competing claim by the Canadian state.

Soft Law in International Investment Law and Arbitration

In the more recent decades, international investment law (“iil”) and arbitration have been going through a process of recalibration prompted by both the intensification of cross-border capital flows and the States’ growing concerns over the potential restraints iil may impose upon the pursuit of public interests. The present contribution will pay attention to a specific feature that can be observed within these developments, i.e. the role played by soft law in investment arbitration and, more generally, under iil, also with a view to assessing the impact on the formation of binding international law of instruments formally devoid of normative force within the international legal order. After an introduction (Section 1), the contribution is articulated into four sections. Section 2 will first define the field of investigation. The case law of investment tribunals and the treaty practice under the more recent iia s will be then explored as to the reliance on soft law instruments for the purposes of settling procedural (Section 3) and substantive issues (Section 4). Some final remarks will close (Section 5).