Absence of women's authorial voices

(Delighted to welcome back alumna Fionnuala Ní Aoláin, who contributes this guest post)

In recent years, feminist international law scholars have wondered if we will ever be more than "a decorative frill on the edge of the discipline." in the apt phrase of IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth.
With that in mind, we take note that an event yesterday on "What Makes a Great International Law Article," hosted by the American Society of International Law. Five of the most cited articles from the past decade were picked out in order to guide conversation on the topic. They were:

► Eric Stein, "International Integration and Democracy No Love at First Sight," 95 American Journal of International Law 489 (2001);
► Paul C. Szasz, "The Security Council Starts Legislating," 96 American Journal of International Law 901 (2002);
► Ryan Goodman, "Human Rights Treaties, Invalid Reservations, and State Consent," 96 American Journal of International Law (2002);
► W. Michael Reisman, "Assessing Claims to Revise the Laws of War," 97 American Journal of International Law 82 (2003); and
► Harold Hongju Koh, "International Law as Part of Our Law," 98 American Journal of International Law 43 (2004).

The notable absence of women in the list is surprising.
It is especially surprising given that international law scholars Christine Bell (another IntLawGrrls guest/alumna), Allison Marston Danner and Anthea Roberts have all garnered the Deák Prize for meritorious scholarship published in the American Journal of International Law, in 2007, 2004 and 2002 respectively.
On a positive note, the panel leading the discussion included two women: one prominent international law scholar and AJIL editor, Dinah Shelton, and AJIL Managing Editor Julie Furgerson.

UN Women: Symbolism or Agent for Change?

As noted by IntLawGrrl Stephanie Farrior here, it was announced this week that former Chilean President, Michelle Bachelet (left) is the new UN Under-Secretary General and will lead the UN Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women, known as UN Women. In this post I want to both outline the structure of the agency and consider why such an agency is required within the UN. While the establishment of UN Women is to be welcomed, questions necessarily arise as to whether or not it will stand as a symbolic commitment to gender equality and the advancement of women and girls or whether (as I hope will be the case) it will really operate as an agent for change to improve the lot of women and girls around the world.

The UN General Assembly -- which, as IntLawGrrl Amy Senier then reported, had adopted a resolution in this regard about a year ago -- established UN Women in July, as part of the organisation’s ongoing reform agenda. Described on its website as “an historic step in accelerating the Organization’s goals on gender equality and the empowerment of women”, UN Women is a new agency that merges four UN organisations: the Division for the Advancement of Women, the International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and Advancement of Women, and the UN Development Fund for Women. Bringing these organisations together, UN Women will not only help to co-ordinate the work undertaken within the organisations but will also constitute a large and broad-ranging internal agency of the UN that can impact on the organisation’s wide range of work.

The establishment of UN Women will not, as far as I can tell, result in gender experts within different parts of the UN from being appointed (such as Professor Catharine MacKinnon’s role as Special Gender Adviser to the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court); neither does it preclude the appointment of special rapporteurs to consider gender aspects of particular issues under consideration by the UN where this is thought appropriate. It should therefore be seen as a consolidation and, indeed, expansion of the gender equality mechanisms within the UN.

According to its website, UN Women has three stated aims:

► To support inter-governmental bodies, such as the Commission on the Status of Women, in their formulation of policies, global standards and norms;

► To help Member States to implement these standards, standing ready to provide suitable technical and financial support to those countries that request it and to forge effective partnerships with civil society; and

► To hold the UN system accountable for its own commitments on gender equality, including regular monitoring of system-wide progress.

This marks an important further step in the full integration of women and, indeed, more generally of gender-consciousness into the work of the United Nations.

The exclusion of women from the originating processes of international law and of the United Nations has been extensively commented on elsewhere, most authoritatively perhaps by Hilary Charlesworth, an IntLawGrrls guest/alumna, and Christine Chinkin in their immensely important monograph on The Boundaries of International Law: A Feminist Analysis (2000). Excluding women from the founding processes of the United Nations resulted in a lack of perspective on the distinctive and particular ways that laws, states and inter-state relationships can impact on women and girls. It also resulted in the occlusion for a long period of time from human rights law of the realities of women’s experiences. This was not exclusive to human rights law, of course; women were traditionally excluded from essentially all areas of international law and interested readers will find the Charlesworth & Chinkin analysis illuminating and, perhaps, depressing. The focus of this post, however, is on human rights law.

While it is of course true that women and girls do not exclusively experience gender-based violence, sexual violence, discrimination and exclusion, it is equally true to acknowledge that women and girls experience these conditions more than men and boys do and that this is related to persistent and pervasive social and legal conditions that disadvantage women. The UN human rights system cannot be accused of having remained in its ‘original’ masculine state; it has over time developed a number of agencies, resolutions, institutions and Conventions that focus specifically on the conditions of life as they are experienced by women. This has been an especial focus of the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and its enforcement mechanisms, but also by a commitment (met to a greater or lesser extent in different situations) to consider the impact of policies, laws and conditions on women and girls. However, CEDAW is not enough on its own: not only is CEDAW not universally ratified and implemented in domestic law, but the extent to which States have entered reservations to important (if not in fact foundational) provisions within the Convention has long been a source of comment.

In addition, an enormous international organisation such as the United Nations is in need of a gender perspective—if not a kind of internal gender watchdog—as is any state or large organisation. It is therefore entirely fitting that UN Women would commit, as it does, to holding “the UN system accountable for its own commitments on gender equality”. This will include not only monitoring of the UN’s institutional progress on gender equality but also, it seems, ‘gender auditing’ proposals from UN bodies and assisting states in the important work of actually operationalising the UN’s standards.

It is heartening to see reference in the above-quoted aims to the provision by UN Women of “suitable technical and financial support to those countries that request it”, but the wording of this aim does give rise to a number of questions:

► Are states where gender inequality is systemic and where women’s rights standards of the UN are not being implemented really likely to “request” the support of UN women?

► Even if they do, will the agency be sufficiently supported in terms of finance, personnel and logistics to provide adequate “technical and financial support” to help those countries to move towards more effective standards of gender equality?

These are questions that cannot reasonably be answered until we have seen UN Women in operation for some years, but it is difficult to not feel some cautious impulses in considering the likely success of the agency. It is also to be hoped that in deciding how to “to forge effective partnerships with civil society”, UN Women will apply gender equality criteria in selecting its civil society partners, including the effective representation of women within the organisations themselves.

None of these notes of caution are intended to under-play the importance of the establishment of UN Women; this is a genuinely welcome development and one that it is hoped will make real progress in advancing the rights of women and girls, and the cause of gender equality, in and through the United Nations. However, until we see how it operates (and, indeed, is facilitated by the wider UN bureaucracy and the member states) UN Women stands as a symbol of the world’s commitment to gender equality and, without sounding too pessimistic a closing note, more symbolism is the last thing the world’s women need. Action, effective commitment, implementation of CEDAW and genuine progression towards gender equality in all areas of human rights protection—civil, political, social, economic and cultural—are much more urgently required.

(Cross posted from Human Rights in Ireland blog)

The Creation of International Law

Greetings from Oslo, where a number of IntLawGrrls (members, guests, and alumnae) are participating in a conference organized by Cecilia Bailliet and others at the University of Oslo Faculty of Law on The Creation of International Law: An Exploration of Normative Innovation, Contextual Application, and Interpretation in a Time of Flux.

Participants include the following women in international law (IntLawGrrls have a * next to their names):

► Henriette Aasen - University of Bergen
► Montserrat Abad - Carlos III University of Madrid
► Sumudu Atapattu (above left) - University of Wisconsin
► * Karima Bennoune (left) Rutgers School of Law, Newark
► * Rebecca M. Bratspies (right, in black) - CUNY School of Law
► Catherine Brölmann (below, in blue) - University of Amsterdam


►* Doris Buss - Carleton University
► Rosemary Byrne (right, with scarf) - Trinity College Dublin
► Christine Byron - Cardiff Law School (below left, in purple)
►* Hilary Charlesworth (below, in white) - Australian National University

► *Fiona de Londras (below) - University College Dublin
► Katherine Del Mar (below right) - University of Geneva
► Malgosia Fitzmaurice - Queen Mary University of London School of Law
► Anne Hellum - University of Oslo
► Agnieszka Jachec-Neale (below right, in front of window) - School of Oriental and Asian Studies
► Edda Kristjansdottir - Amsterdam Law School
► Catharine MacKinnon - Harvard Law School/U. Michigan Law School
► Claudia Martin - AU Washington College of Law
► *Fionnuala Ni Aoláin - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Phoebe Okawa (right) - Queen Mary University School of Law
► *Hari M. Osofsky - U. Minnesota School of Law
► Inger Johanne Sand - University of Oslo
► Kirsten Sandberg (right, in green) - University of Oslo
► Birgit Schlütter - Norwegian Center for Human Rights
► Hitomi Takemura - NUI Galway & Kyusha International University
► * Beth Van Schaack - Santa Clara University School of Law
► Maria Varaki - PhD candidate, NUI Galway; Irish Centre for Human Rights

Stay tuned for additional postings from the conference.

ASIL honorees, awardees sought

Following our earlier posts respecting requests for nominations to leadership positions in the American Society of International Law (here) and to the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law (here):
ASIL committees seek nominations for the following:

Medals, Honor Certificate

ASIL's Honors Committee -- chaired by John Crook and also including IntLawGrrl Hope Lewis, as well as our colleagues Vaughan Lowe, Ved Nanda, and Kathleen Paisley -- asks ASIL members to nominate persons for the Society's highest honors, to be awarded at the annual meeting next March:

► Goler T. Butcher Medal (right), given to a distinguished person of American or other nationality for outstanding contributions to the development or effective realization of international human rights law. The medal commemorates the lifework of Goler Teal Butcher (1925-1993), an IntLawGrrls foremother, whose many achievements included Howard University Law Professor, State Department official, and head of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Previous honorees include another IntLawGrrls foremother, Virginia Leary (prior post), as well as IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth; here is the full list of honorees.

► Manley O. Hudson Medal (right), given from time to time, without regard to recipient's nationality, for scholarship and achievement in international law. The medal commemorates the lifework of Manley Ottmer Hudson (1886-1960), whose many achievements included Harvard Law Professor, Judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice and ASIL President. As posted, the 2010 Medal winner was another past President, Edith Brown Weiss, a Georgetown Law Professor; here is a list of all previous honorees.

► Designation as Honorary Member, for a non-U.S. citizen who has rendered distinguished contributions or service in the field of international law. Previous honorees here.

The Honors Committee welcomes nominations for each of these three honors, to be submitted no later than August 31, 2010, via the online nomination form available here. The Committee will include in its consideration nominations made in previous years; it invites persons who made nominations in previous years to supplement their earlier letters as appropriate.

Questions may be directed to the Committee by contacting Veronica Onorevole at 2011awards@asil.org.

Scholarship Awards
Authors, publishers, and readers are encouraged to submit works appropriate for the book awards known as ASIL Certificates of Merit, given for preeminent contribution to:
► Creative scholarship;
► Specialized area of international law; and/or
► High technical craftsmanship.
(Previous honorees here.) Eligible are books by authors of any nationality, published in any language and at any place in the 24 months preceding February 1, 2011. To nominate, send 6 copies of the work no later than October 1, 2010, to Veronica Onorevole, Executive Office & Programs Manager, American Society of International Law, 2223 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20008.

Guest Blogger: Alice Edwards

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure to welcome Dr. Alice Edwards (right) as today's guest blogger.
Alice, about whose scholarship IntLawGrrl Jaya Ramji-Nogales has posted, is Lecturer in International Refugee and Human Rights Law at the Refugee Studies Centre at Oxford University in England; she's also a member of Oxford's Faculty of Law. Previously she was Lecturer in British Human Rights Law at the University of Nottingham. She is a past recipient of an Arthur C. Helton Fellowship of the American Society of International Law and winner of the 2008 Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship in the Human Rights of Women from the University of Texas. She is author of over 20 articles on displacement and refugees, human rights, and women’s rights/feminist theory, including a forthcoming collection entitled Human Security and Noncitizens (Cambridge University Press), co-edited with Redress Director Carla Ferstman. Alice completed her PhD in 2008 from the Australian National University under the supervision of IntLawGrrl guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth. Cambridge is scheduled to publish her dissertation in 2010, as Violence against Women and International Human Rights Law: Not Yet Equal.
Prior to joining the academy full-time, Alice worked for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, serving in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Rwanda, Morocco, and at HQ in Geneva; for the International Secretariat of Amnesty International in London; and for Food for the Hungry International in Mozambique.
In her guest post below, Alice comments on recommendations, contained in the just-released National Human Rights Consultation Report, for improving the legal framework of human rights protection in Australia.
She dedicates her post to feminist/humanitarian Rosamond Carr, for the reasons detailed in her further guest post below. Carr joins other foremothers in the list just below our "visiting from..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Susan Harris Rimmer

It's IntLawGrrls' great pleasure today to welcome Dr. Susan Harris Rimmer (left) as a guest blogger.
Susan is a Research Officer at the Centre for International Governance and Justice (prior post), where she works with IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Hilary Charlesworth, Centre Director, on the building of democracy after conflict. Susan graduated from the University of Queensland in 1997 with a bachelor' degree in government and an LL.B., both with honors, having received a University Medal in 1996. In December 2008 she earned a Doctor of Juridical Science from the Australian National University College of Law for her thesis, which Routledge will publish as Gender and Transitional Justice: The Women of East Timor in 2010. In 2006 the University of Texas School of Law awarded Susan the Audre Rapoport Prize for Scholarship on the Human Rights of Women.
Susan currently serves as a member of the Board of UNIFEM Australia and is President of the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights.
Her career before entering academia was diverse. After some volunteer work with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, Susan did her articles of clerkship with national law firm Blake Dawson Waldron, and was admitted as a solicitor in March 2000. Since then, Susan has pursued human rights and refugee advocacy work with the National Council of Churches in Australia, the Australian Council for International Development, and the UNHCR. From 2005 until 2008, Susan was a Research Specialist at the Parliamentary Library, advising Australia's Federal Parliamentarians on legal issues relating to refugees and terrorism.
In her guest post below, Susan describes the continuing struggle, by women in post-independence East Timor, against sexual and gender-based violence.
Susan dedicates her post to Shirley Perry Smith (1924-1998), better known as Mum Shirl (below right). Susan explains:

Mum Shirl was a prominent Aboriginal Australian and activist committed to justice and welfare of Aboriginal Australians. Smith began to visit Aboriginal people in prison after one of her brothers was incarcerated, and she discovered that her visits were beneficial to other prisoners as well. Her community activism also saw her accompanying indigenous people who were unfamiliar with the legal system to court when they had been charged with a crime. Her nickname came from her habit of replying, 'I’m his Mum,' whenever officials queried her relationship with the prisoners.
Mum Shirl also spent considerable time and money finding homes for children whose parents could not look after them, and helping displaced children to find their own parents again. The children with nowhere to go often ended up living with her. By the early 1990s she had raised over 60 children. Likewise, many people with no family or friends in Sydney arrived at Mum Shirl’s house seeking shelter.
She was a founding member of the Aboriginal Legal Service, Aboriginal Medical Service, Aboriginal Tent Embassy, the Aboriginal Children’s Service, and the Aboriginal Housing Company in Redfern, a suburb of Sydney, Australia.

Today Smith joins other IntLawGrrls foremothers in the list below our "visiting from ..." map at right.
Heartfelt welcome!

Guest Blogger: Hilary Charlesworth

It is IntLawGrrls' immense honor to welcome Hilary Charlesworth (right) as today's guest blogger.
A foremost scholar in international and human rights law, Hilary, about whom we've frequently posted, is an Australian Research Council Federation Fellow, Professor in RegNet and Director of the Centre for International Governance and Justice, Australian National University. She also holds an appointment as Professor of International Law and Human Rights in the ANU College of Law.
She has held visiting appointments at the law schools at Harvard, Washington & Lee, New York University, the University of Oregon, Université de Paris 1 (Panthéon-Sorbonne, and UCLA. She was also the 2005 Sir Ninian Stephen Fellow at the Asia-Pacific Centre for Military Law at the Law Faculty, University of Melbourne.
Inaugural President from 1997 to 2001 of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law, Hilary served as a Co-Editor of the Australian Yearbook of International Law from 1996 to 2006 and a member of the Board of Editors of the American Journal of International Law from 1999 to 2009. She has worked with various nongovernmental human rights organisations on ways to implement international human rights standards, and was Chair of the Australian Capital Territory Government's inquiry into an ACT bill of rights, which resulted in the adoption of the ACT Human Rights Act 2004. She is Patron of the ACT Women's Legal Service, the Victorian Foundation for Survivors of Torture and Lawyers Without Borders.
In 2006 Hilary, along with London School of Economics Professor Christine Chinkin, received the American Society of International Law award for outstanding contributions to the development of international human rights law: the Goler T. Butcher Medal, whose namesake is an IntLawGrrls foremother.
For her own foremother, Hilary has chosen to share with IntLawGrrl Hélène Ruiz Fabri the 18th C. feminist and slavery abolitionist writer Marie Gouze, known as Olympe de Gouges (right).
In 1793, 45 years after she'd been born to a washerwoman mother and butcher father, Gouges died beneath the guillotine. Among her most famous works was the 1791 Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne, which IntLawGrrls excerpted on a recent Bastille Day. Gouges also theorized the paradox of feminism; Hilary's guest post below considers that concept in this 30th year since U.N. adoption of a multilateral women's rights treaty.

Heartfelt welcome!

Inside/Outside: Women & International Law

(My thanks to IntLawGrrls for the opportunity to contribute this guest post, based on "Feminist International Legal Studies and Thirty Years of the CEDAW Convention," a paper I delivered earlier this month at the Asian Society of International Law conference in Tokyo, Japan)

French Revolutionary feminist Olympe de Gouges (right) puzzled over whether women’s rights are best protected through general or specific norms. The record of the human rights system of the United Nations illustrates that both general and specific provisions have been of limited value to women. That fact provokes a question: Can this situation be changed at the institutional level? Consideration of key institutions may point to answers.

Women's Convention
The most wide-ranging of the international human rights treaties devoted to women is the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, adopted by the U.N. General Assembly in Resolution A/RES/34/180 on December 18, 1979. The Women's Convention also attempts to overcome a dichotomy between public and private spheres of activity observed in international law, in which law is used to regulate ‘public’ areas such as politics or education, but leaves ‘private’ areas such as the family unregulated. The Women’s Convention, for example, explicitly affirms women's right to equality in a limited way within the family, unlike human rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
One striking omission from the Women’s Convention is the prohibition of violence against women. This may be because, at the time of the treaty’s adoption, the global extent of violence against women was not well-understood, or because violence was not analysed as a matter of discrimination. The Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women, the Women’s Convention monitoring body, endeavored to fill this vacuum. In 1992 CEDAW adopted a General Recommendation on Violence against Women, stating:

Gender-based violence is a form of discrimination which … impairs or nullifies the enjoyment by women of human rights and fundamental freedoms.

Despite (or perhaps because of) its broad coverage, the Women’s Convention is widely disregarded.
It has attracted an impressive number of parties -- 186 to date. But many states have made broad reservations to provisions of the treaty, which effectively undermine their commitment to it. Most of these reservations are based on assertions of culture and religion. Some states have objected to some of the wide reservations, and CEDAW has probed reserving states on this issue. Under the international legal regime governing reservations, however, no more direct sanctions can be used to pressure states to withdraw their sweeping reservations.

CEDAW Optional Protocol
Adopted in 2000, the Optional Protocol allows for both individual communications to CEDAW and an inquiry procedure in cases of systematic and widespread violations of the treaty. These mechanisms have been invoked much less frequently than comparable provisions in other human rights treaties. As an example, CEDAW has made a single inquiry under Article 8 of the Optional Protocol in July 2004 dealing with violence against women in Mexico. The Committee has adopted views or made decisions on 11 communications since 2004, and of these, has found 4 breaches of the Convention. In contrast, the Human Rights Committee has considered 1279 registered communications with respect to 77 countries under the Optional Protocol to the ICCPR, and recorded over 250 decisions/views during the same period.

CEDAW Committee
I should note the significant role played by the CEDAW Committee. It has been very active in developing jurisprudence under the Women’s Convention, emphasising direct and indirect discrimination against women and focussing on the reality of women’s lives and the need for structural change, rather than simply formal equality.

Feminism's Paradox
Overall, however, the development of international human rights standards dealing with women illustrates a strategic dilemma. It is the dilemma that Olympe de Gouges identified in the 18th century as the paradox of feminism: whether women’s rights are best protected through general norms or through specific norms applicable only to women. This dilemma pervades modern international legal responses to the unequal position of women. The attempt to improve women’s lives through general laws can allow women’s concerns to be submerged in what are deemed more global issues; however, the price of creating separate institutional mechanisms for women has been the building of a women’s ghetto with less power, resources, and priority than the ‘general’ human rights bodies.
Attention to questions of women and gender in the U.N. human rights system has been haphazard. At best, there is attention to the position of women in particular contexts, mainly in statistical terms. But there has been little understanding of the way in which stereotypes about sex and gender roles can affect the human right in question. Violations of women’s human rights are typically presented as an aspect of women’s inherent vulnerability, as if this attribute were a biological fact.
Olympe de Gouges’ conundrum about the best strategy to pursue women’s rights cannot be easily resolved. Women are always likely to struggle for recognition of their rights, whether they operate within general or women-specific agencies. The way ahead is to work through all available institutions, to lessen the disparity between the lives of women and men across the globe. Breaking away from the limited equality paradigm endorsed by international law would be a good beginning.
Thirty years after the adoption of the Women’s Convention, and after 20 years of feminist scholarship in international law, we can observe that feminist vocabularies have arrived in international law. I have suggested that the vocabularies can be hollowed out by bland repetition and deployed to reinforce the status quo. However, the language of justice and international law contains radical potential, even if it is realised only occasionally. As Sally Engle Merry (right) has observed, international human rights law in particular

is always in danger of escaping its bounds and working in a genuinely emancipatory way.

The most valuable aspect of the Women’s Convention is the cultural change it can encourage through identifying and defining problems in an international forum.

Go On! "Feminist Internationalisms"

(Go On! is an occasional item on symposia of interest) The Centre for International Governance and Justice at the Australian National University will sponsor a 2-day workshop November 23 & 24, 2009, at Hedley Bull Centre at the university, in Canberra.
Entitled "Feminist Internationalisms: Celebrating feminist engagements with international law and politics," the workshop will focus on Australasian work on feminist internationalism in the fields of international relations and international law.
J. Ann Tickner (below right) (photo credit), Professor of International Relations at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, will give the keynote address. Also scheduled to take part are: IntLawGrrls guest/alumna Penelope Andrews, Valparaiso University; Hilary Charlesworth, Bina D'Costa, Nicole George, Susan Harris Rimmer, and Katrina Lee-Koo, Australian National University; Anne Orford and Dianne Otto, University of Melbourne; Andrew Byrnes, University of New South Wales; Juanita Elias and Judith Gardam, University of Adelaide; Marianne Hanson, University of Queensland; and Jaqcui True, University of Auckland. Papers will explore economics, security, democracy and human rights, using feminist inquiry both as a theoretical lens and a methodology.

Details and registration here.

Write On! International Theory

(Write On! is an occasional item about notable calls for papers.) Editors Alex Wendt & Duncan Snidal, political scientists from Ohio State University and the University of Chicago, respectively, are seeking submissions for papers to be published in International Theory, a 3-times-a-year, peer-reviewed, Cambridge University Press journal set for a 2009 début.
(Among those serving on the editorial board: our colleagues Jutta Brunnée, University of Toronto; Hilary Charlesworth, Australian National University; Robyn Eckersley, University of Melbourne; Toni Erskine, University of Aberstwyth, Wales; and Kimberly Hutchings, London School of Economics.)
As fully described here, the aim is for a genuinely interdisciplinary review -- linking international relations theory, international legal theory, and international political theory -- a review that
► promotes theoretical scholarship about the positive, legal, and normative aspects of world politics respectively;
► is open to theory of absolutely all varieties and from all disciplines, provided it addresses problems of politics, broadly defined and pertains to the international;
► welcomes scholarship that uses evidence from the real world to advance theoretical arguments; and
► is intended as a forum where scholars can develop theoretical arguments in depth without an expectation of extensive empirical analysis.
Invited are papers on theory of all varieties and from all disciplines, provided that they address problems of politics, broadly defined, and relate to the international.
Submission details are here; inquiries may be e-mailed to it.mershon@osu.edu.

4 Societies, 5 countries, 15 scholars & 1 address on the International Law Commission

Among the treats at 4 Societies: An insider's view of the International Law Commission.
4 Societies Workshop is the name given to the biennial scholars' roundtable cosponsored by a quartet of international law societies. The 1st took place in 2006 at Victoria University of Wellington, courtesy of the Australian and New Zealand Society of International Law. Thanks to the hard work of Professor Joanna Harrington and Professor Craig Forcese, both members of the Canadian Council of Law, the University of Alberta in Edmonton last week hosted the 2d. (Next stop, courtesy of the Japan Society of International Law: Kobe 2010.) Fifteen scholars from 5 countries presented in Edmonton (above); it was my honor to serve, along with American Society of International Law Executive Director Elizabeth Andersen, as a moderator and commenter.
Of special interest was the keynote address in which University of Ottawa Law Professor Don McRae, who'd been elected to the ILC in 2006, asked:

Is there a future for the International Law Commission?

A future, yes, he answered. But not necessarily the future foreseen when the ILC was established in 1947.

McRae began by listing some of the topics on the ILC's agenda:

► New draft articles on transboundary aquifers, about which IntLawGrrls just posted;

► A long-running study of treaty reservations;

► A study of how armed conflict affects treaties;

► Examination of whether the duty aut dedere aut judicare -- to prosecute or extradite -- derives solely from treaties or has become a norm of customary international law;

► A project on the responsibility of international organizations;

► Analysis of the law respecting the expulsion of aliens across state borders;

► Consideration of the immunity of state officials in the wake of cases like Pinochet and Democratic Republic v. Congo; and

► Examination of the extent to which law protects persons caught up in natural disasters like typhoons and earthquakes; that is, whether other states may intervene when the territorial state refuses to assist its own suffering nationals, as occurred earlier this year in Burma/Myanmar.

For most of its existence the Commission approached such problems always with an eye to codification -- to the drafting of treaties that would establish international rules as hard law. That goal seems more elusive, McRae said. Positing that the world is going through an "anti-treaty phase," during which "governments don't want to commit themselves to making things legally binding," McRae suggested that the ILC may find itself more and more in the business of creating soft law. He noted that draft articles articulating principles of law that states may choose to follow, like those on state responsibility and transboundary aquifers, are likely to have more global influence than a treaty that never enters into force.

McRae pointed to 2 other areas ripe for adaptation:

► Methodology. The Commission's work could be improved, he said, by greater consultation with experts outside the law. In this regard he lauded the outreach that Commissioner Chusei Yamada of Japan made to scientists in the course of developing the aquifer articles.

► Diversity. Anyone familiar with the pathbreaking work of Hilary Charlesworth, Christine Chinkin, and Shelley Wright will recall that in Feminist Approaches to International Law, 85 American Journal of International Law 613, 623 (1991), they underscored that no woman ever had sat on the 34-member Commission. That has changed a wee bit. Today there are 3 women Commissioners, Paula Escarameia of Portugal (above, middle), Marie G. Jacobsson of Sweden (above, left), and Hanqin Xue of China (right)-- a fact that prompted McRae's allowance that criticism of the ILC as lacking diversity "has a great deal of credibility in terms of gender."

Indeed.