Cases and Materials on International Law

There have been many developments in international law since the last edition of this casebook. As always, there were important judicial and arbitral cases. Chief among these was the Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius case before the International Court of Justice.

Here the Court advised that the United Kingdom had infringed the principle of self-determination when separating the Archipelago from Mauritius during de-colonization and that the United Kingdom was obliged to bring to an end its administration there. The opinion was strongly endorsed by the UN General Assembly but rejected by the state concerned. Of political import too was the ruling of the International Criminal Court that "head of state" immunity could not bar pro-proceedings before the Court initiated by the UN Security Council, even though the state concerned was not a party to the Court's Statute (Omar Hassan Ahmad Al-Bashir case).

Elsewhere, there were key judgments and awards on the law of the sea. These included cases before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, now an established part of the international judicial firmament. Most notably, the Tribunal issued provisional measures ordering the Russian Federation to release and return Ukrainian naval vessels and resolved a long-standing maritime boundary dispute between Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire. And arbitral tribunals decided that the Russian Federation had acted illegally in seizing a Greenpeace vessel and arresting campaigners seeking to board an oil production platform (Arctic Sunrise Arbitration) and rejected claims by China to maritime entitlement in the seas surrounding the Spratly Islands (South China Sea Arbitration).

There were also developments in the UN international human rights system. The Human Rights Committee made further progress in replacing early General Comments by others reflecting its now extensive practice in the post-Cold War period. General Comment No 36 on Article 6: Right to Life is the latest example. The treaty monitoring bodies generally adopted views on an increasing number of individual communications.

The UN Human Rights Committee found that legislation prohibiting the wearing of a face veil in a public place violated freedom of religion (Yaker v France) and that laws severely restricting resort to abortion infringed, inter alia, the right to privacy (Whelan v Ireland). A new departure were the first views of the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in individual communication cases, including S.C. and G.P. v Italy on in vitro fertilisation and the right to health.