For the past 150 years, the Institut de Droit International (IDI) has held a prominent position in the field of international law, garnering recognition as one of the world's distinguished professional organizations for international lawyers. Yet, a closer look at its structures reveals that in fact, the IDI has been and remains an elitist club, comprised of renowned international legal jurists, practitioners, and scholars. Its goal was and is to formulate “principles from which rules [of international law] could be deduced.”1 While there may be doubts regarding the contemporary authority of the IDI in shaping today's international law, it possessed significant influence during its first century of existence. Therefore, on the occasion of its 150th anniversary, this essay offers an alternative perspective on the IDI's contribution to the field, focusing on the implications of its claimed status of the “legal conscience of the civilized world” and exploring whether this status had somehow impacted international legal norms and principles. While further empirical investigation is required to establish a definitive correlation between the IDI's affiliations with the “civilized world” and a skewed focus of international law on Western legal traditions, a few examples can serve as a starting point. The illustrations from the IDI's engagement with the laws of war—specifically, the nineteenth-century regulation of occupation and the post-World War II determination of military targets—exemplify how the inherent elitism rooted in the notion of “civilization” can be discerned in pivotal advancements of international law.

The 150th anniversary of the Institut de Droit International (IDI) and the International Law Association (ILA) provides an opportunity to assess the role of legal scholarship in the codification and institutionalization of international law. This essay argues that academic expertise is a form of social and political capital that is at once individual, institutional, and structural. Empirically focused on international dispute settlement mechanisms (interstate adjudication and arbitration), this essay underscores that academic expertise shapes the professional status of international lawyers, and influences the clout of international institutions as codifiers of international law.

In her article “Constitution-Making as a Technique of International Law: Reconsidering the Post-war Inheritance,” Anna Saunders focuses on constitution-making as an international practice of the past three decades and suggests that its “epistemic boundaries”—namely, the separation between the formal and material dimensions of constitution-making and the latter's exclusion from contemporary constitution-making assistance—were primarily established by scholarly work on constitution-making in the post-war era. Saunders explicitly acknowledges that her account is not the only possible history of constitution-making assistance. In this essay, I add a different layer to that history, focusing on the UN Transition Assistance Group (UNTAG) in Namibia. UNTAG is often considered the first instance of international constitution-making assistance, a practice that is generally understood to have emerged after the end of the Cold War. However, UNTAG's mandate, including its constitution-making assistance component, was in fact conceived many years before its actual deployment, dating back to the 1960s and 1970s. The essay shows that UN constitution-making assistance pre-dates the end of the Cold War and is linked to UN efforts to forge modern nation-states in the context of decolonization. I argue that this early case of constitution-making practice was an important blueprint for further iterations of international constitution-making assistance, not least because of the continuous involvement of individual international civil servants. Lastly, the case of Namibia is significantly different from the cases that inspired scholarly work in the post-war era, and we might ask to what extent the post-war inheritance affected this early international practice. I end with a brief reflection on Saunders's call to address the material dimension of constitution-making and caution against overemphasizing substantive questions in constitution-making assistance.

International instruments fail to specify the meaning of gender identity. Yet gender identity has been invoked as a prohibited ground of discrimination, particularly in cases concerning trans persons. Trans existences fall outside the expectation of a correspondence between sex and gender. “Trans” is an umbrella term referring to people who do not identify with the sex attributed to them at birth. This broad definition encompasses pre-operative and post-operative transsexuals, as well as persons who have not undergone any medical intervention and do not conform to the social norms of expression and self-identification imposing the binary. Regional conventions do not define the concept of gender identity either. Documents issued by the United Nations (UN) and regional human rights bodies frequently rely on the category, without any clear explanation of the notion, or of what makes gender identity different from gender as such. Relying on Lacanian psychoanalysis, this essay argues that gender is an identity per se and challenges international law's treatment of gender and gender identity as distinct categories. Underlying this essay is the view that questioning the shape that the law gives to “gender identity” is the preliminary step to evaluating what protections human rights law can or cannot offer to individuals.

La literatura sobre el Derecho internacional suele asumir que la relación del populismo con este último es antagónica1. Sin embargo, una perspectiva centrada en América Latina, donde el populismo ha sido estudiado desde principios del siglo veinte, complejiza esta noción: líderes populistas han adoptado el multilateralismo, promovido la unidad regional e intentado crear instituciones internacionales. Además, tanto populistas como nopopulistas han resistido instituciones internacionales. Este ensayo problematiza la asunción de una relación necesariamente antagónica entre el populismo y el Derecho internacional, sosteniendo que dicha asunción carece de sustento empírico y está teóricamente subdesarrollada. Latinoamérica es un lugar relevante para problematizar esta noción, debido al rol del Poder Ejecutivo en la conducción de relaciones exteriores2 y la rica historia intelectual en la región respecto del populismo. El ensayo enfatiza la necesidad de desarrollar un marco teórico adecuado para el estudio de la relación entre populismo y Derecho internacional, marco que debiese ser menos eurocéntrico y sesgado normativamente, sin asumir que la resistencia al Derecho internacional siempre carece de mérito. Adicionalmente, debería permitirnos identificar lo distintivamente populista en esta relación y qué aspectos están mediados por las ideologías huésped.

A comienzos del siglo veinte, al celebrarse la primera reunión del entonces recién creado Instituto Americano de Derecho Internacional, juristas de distintos países adoptaron una declaración que estipulaba que “el derecho internacional es a la vez nacional e internacional”1. Casi cien años después, si hay un aspecto del Derecho internacional que tiene un rasgo distintivamente latinoamericano, y que da cuenta de la idea acuñada en esa Declaración, es el Derecho internacional de los derechos humanos. Desde la adopción de la Declaración Americana de de los Derechos y Deberes del Hombre, en 1948, y especialmente a partir de la década de los cincuenta, con la creación de la Comisión Interamericana de Derechos Humanos, y luego con la adopción de la Convención Americana sobre Derechos Humanos, en 1969, los derechos fundamentales han sido, son y todo indica que seguirán siendo un proceso y fenómeno radicalmente regional del Derecho internacional. Este ensayo analiza, a través del desarrollo de la jurisprudencia de la Corte Interamericana, la manera como se ha construido el Derecho transnacional de los derechos humanos en América Latina, con la formación del sistema interamericano, hasta las formas peculiares de interacción e influencia entre el Derecho internacional y el Derecho constitucional. Revisando la jurisprudencia reciente sobre justiciabilidad de derechos sociales, el ensayo muestra cómo la idea de un derecho común de los derechos humanos presenta dificultades que deben atenderse si se quiere tomar en serio el carácter transnacional de los derechos humanos en la región.

The lives of peasants are strongly interconnected with their territories, economies, and local institutions. At the same time, they have been historically defined by international processes and decisions that are taken elsewhere and affect their autonomy and identity. This is clearly the case when smallholders (that is, farmers who work small plots of land, mostly less than two hectares) are part of transnational food chains, but it is also true when their market is the local community: even when peasants do not grow global food commodities, they can be affected by the dynamics and continuous expansion of the transnational food system. Given the local impacts of international processes and regulatory frameworks, peasant organizations have increasingly organized translocally to participate in the international policy spaces, and try to subvert the legal structures that are shaping their lives and territories. This essay discusses those attempts by peasants to organize beyond their local realities to increase their political power and promote their vision of international economic law as a central piece in their long term strategy for recognition, food sovereignty, and consolidation of territorial and agroecological food systems. The essay provides a diagnosis of farmers’ silencing and exclusion by international economic law, presents the movement La Vía Campesina as a platform for translocal solidarity and multi-scalar engagement, and elaborates on peasants’ “cosmopolitan insurgence” and their promotion of food sovereignty as an alternative project for international economic law.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has brought on unspeakable suffering. It has already injured and killed scores of people. It has displaced millions who now face an uncertain future. It raises the specter of all-out cyber war that threatens to draw other countries into the conflict. It is raging not only on the ground in Ukraine, but also on internet platforms where disinformation has spread. It tests the resilience of international partnerships and alliances. Beyond these immediate implications, the Russian attack on Ukraine also violates the prohibition on aggressive use of force, a foundational principle of the post-World War II international order. Facing these alarming prospects, many are pessimistic about what the war in Ukraine may portend for the future of international law and international relations. Surprisingly, however, some of the bleakest predictions have not yet been realized. Quite the contrary. We argue that there is a lot to be optimistic about when it comes to the role of international law, partnerships and norms in this conflict.

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This essay examines how EU criminal law, which regulates certain aspects of criminal procedural law of the twenty-seven EU member states, addresses the situation of persons with disabilities who come into contact with the criminal justice system. EU law on victims and on suspects and accused persons (partially) addresses disability through the prism of “vulnerability.” This essay argues that associating persons with disabilities with “vulnerability” can be stigmatizing. Moreover, the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD), which requires that persons with disabilities have effective access to justice and receive appropriate accommodations, does not link these rights to a prior recognition of “vulnerability.” Even though the EU is a party to the CRPD, the 2013 Recommendation from the European Commission on Procedural Safeguards for Vulnerable Persons Suspected or Accused in Criminal Proceedings, frames disability in terms of “vulnerability.” In contrast, parts of the EU Victims’ Rights Directive address the situation of individuals with disabilities without using the language of vulnerability.