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The combat against the COVID-19 pandemic in Belgium led to the adoption of several measures that impacted the freedom of religion or belief. The particular focus of this article is the collective exercise of religion in places of worship and its protection by judicial actors during the first two years of the COVID-19 crisis. This choice was prompted by the fact that the government measures taken in this context had significant consequences for this form of religious manifestation...

As one of many portraits collected in Immi Tallgren’s eye-opening portrait gallery of (forgotten) women in International Law, this chapter paints a picture of Gezina van der Molen. Contrary to many of the women discussed in this book, Van der Molen was already recognized as a significant actor in the world of international law and relations in her day. In many of her roles she was the first woman in a man’s world: the first woman to obtain a doctorate at the Free University of Amsterdam; the first female professor at that university; the first woman to be appointed as a member of the Permanent Court of Arbitration. For Van der Molen, it was not so much the positions that were important, but the work she could do through those positions – work that she had also pursued as a resistance fighter in the Second World War and in various social groups. This work was initially heavily inspired by the religious and moral principles of the church to which she belonged: the Neo-Calvinist. But her increasing encounter with plurality created a dilemma that still confronts international lawyers today: given that there are many different readings of what justice requires, who should be able to determine its meaning in concrete circumstances? In one prominent role, that of Chairwoman of the ‘Committee for War Foster Children’, it was Van der Molen who was to a large extent responsible for deciding just that. It has been her insistence on equality without wanting to recognize cultural differences as being legally relevant that has turned her into a pioneer who cannot be celebrated.

In most legal orders, human germline modification is either prohibited or severely restricted. A recurring thought in these legal frameworks is that heritable genome editing would result in practices that are at odds with principles of human rights, such as dignity, justice, and equality. However, now that CRISPR is bringing heritable genome editing within human reach, the question has risen as to whether these human rights bans still make sense. The call is growing louder to lift the ban on heritable genome editing for therapeutic purposes as soon as the technology is safe for introduction in the clinic. This article critically examines these recent proposals from a human rights perspective. First, it examines the question as to how realistic the proposed distinction between the therapeutic and the nontherapeutic uses of human germline modification is in the CRISPR era. Second, it argues that these proposals rely on a one-dimensional understanding of the meaning of human rights for this issue. Finally, it suggests that this one-dimensional understanding paves the way for a regime of self-regulation by the scientific community that leaves little room for public debate on the question as to whether or how human germline modification fits in the long-term aspirations of society.

In this volume academic authors discuss the bank capital and liquidity requirements as they are stemming from the Single Rule Book for Banks (Capital Requirements Regulation) and the origin of these rules in the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision standards, with a focus on the Basel III Capital and Liquidity Accord

The chapter provides a Kantian reading of EU internal market law and the refugee crisis of 2015. The chapter argues that the EU should be viewed as a cosmopolitan union. The authors ask whether EU law, understood as positive cosmopolitan law, can be qualified as an extension of the legal condition, and whether it can be viewed as consistent with the other two parts of public law, especially with the freedom of EU member states which also depend on the possible connection to global, much less extensive, systems of positive cosmopolitan law such as migration law.

© The Contributors 2021.‘EU legality’ in EU migration and asylum laws can be considered as a double-edged sword. This chapter describes how, on the one hand, the CJEU, by the mere application of general principles of EU law, offered in its case-law important criteria strengthening the rights and legal protection of third-country nationals while, on the other hand, more recent developments show that the EU legislator, but also the CJEU, almost artificially excludes migration laws or decisions from the legal framework of the EU. It will be argued that developments of ‘re-nationalization’, the application of mutual trust, and the externalization of EU asylum and migration policies, challenge the applicability of general principles of EU legality, including the protection of fundamental rights and the right to effective judicial protection.

Even though the Netherlands was one of the founding fathers of the CoE, the impact of CoE conventions and soft law on Dutch administrative law and the development of the principles of good administration is rather patchy and uneven. This ‘Dutch paradox’ can be explained by the much more significant and direct impact of the European Convention on Human Rights on both substantive and procedural national administrative law. At least partly, this impact can be explained by the existence of a coherent body of ECtHR case law that is relevant to almost all areas of administrative law and that can be readily and easily applied on the national level. Nevertheless, the chapter concludes that it might be useful for Dutch authorities to keep an eye on other CoE instruments that may be relevant for the development of general administrative law, especially because the ECHR provides for minimum protection only.

The fifth volume of the Chilcot Report describes the development of the legal advice provided by Lord Goldsmith to the British government on the legality of the invasion in Iraq. It tracks his change of mind from the view that UNSC Resolution 1441 did not authorise military action, to the ‘better view’1 that no further resolution was needed to authorise military action. Some sixty pages into volume 5 of the Report, a remarkable exchange between Lord Goldsmith, Jack Straw and Sir Michael Wood is described.2 It starts with a memo by Wood, who states there is ‘no doubt’ about the illegality of using force against Iraq, ‘without a further decision of the [Security] Council,...

International criminal courts (ICCs) have made a decisive contribution to the clarification of international criminal law. By interpreting generally formulated rules, the courts have elucidated the meaning of international crimes and modes of liability. However, in applying the law to individual cases, they have not always explained the interplay between general rules and case-specific facts sufficiently. In particular, the courts have often not made clear on which facts their findings are based and have not linked these facts to the applicable legal standards in a systematic way, thus creating uncertainty about the law's precise meaning and scope. This article shows how a casuistic model of judicial reasoning can help to dispel this uncertainty. In particular, it demonstrates how ICCs can use casuistic reasoning techniques to clarify the interplay between law and facts and to explain their decisions in a more transparent and structured way.

This chapter analyses a treaty made on behalf of the Association Internationale du Congo (the infamous private company of King Leopold II of Belgium) with roi Né-Do’ucoula of Boma on 19 April 1884. Whereas legal analysis would usually focus on the content of the treaty and its provisions to establish legal facts, this chapter moves the attention to the signatures at the bottom. It argues that they constitute an important object of international law, as they provide a counter narrative to the popular Standard of Civilisation as the founding doctrine of the Family of Nations in the nineteenth century. As objects of international law the signatures—or rather marks or crosses—embody at the same time the condition of possibility of the nineteenth-century international legal order, and undermine its defining framework (that is, constitute its condition of impossibility).

This chapter explores the different roles that material objects play in international law. It utilizes the ambiguity in the phrase ‘objects of international law’. First, this means that the objects concerned are somehow produced by international law; that they exist by virtue of the practices, scripts, and traditions in international law. The chapter develops this idea in section one, building on theories of attributes or properties (props) in theatre. Just like props in theatre, objects in law fulfil different functions, including the construction of subjectivity, setting in motion a chain of action, and symbolizing larger social–political topics. Second, the phrase ‘objects of international law’ refers to the signalling function of the objects concerned; they tell something about international law and its histories. This point is elaborated on in section two, based on museum and exhibition theories.

At the beginning of the twelfth century a university emerged at Bologna where the study of Roman law was taken up. The rst generations of scholars, the glossators, interpreted the Corpus iuris civilis in its medieval shape (subdivided into ve volumes) and produced various types of scholarly works: glosses, lecturae, summae, etc. Learned jurists of the fourteenth and fteenth centuries, the commentators, continued the exegetical work of their predecessors. They no longer wrote glosses, but continuous commentaries. Moreover, they produced consilia, advisory opinions given in view of specic court cases. By this time the study of Roman law had spread over major parts of southern Europe. With the dissemination of canon law and the foundation of universities, the knowledge of Roman law could also spread to more northern regions, penetrate into legal practice, and lay the foundation of a common legal culture on the continent: the ius commune.

This paper scrutinizes the alleged pluralism between JCE and joint perpetration. It illustrates that the ICC and the ICTY in practice establish criminal responsibility under JCE and joint perpetration based on the participants’ cooperation in, and informed contribution to, a (criminal) organization involved in the commission of international crimes. This makes the alleged pluralism between these theories of liability nominal rather than actual. Instead of stressing the differences between JCE and joint perpetration, it is therefore more productive to focus on the similarities. The paper accordingly draws an analogy with domestic theories of criminal responsibility for (co-)perpetration and participation in a criminal organization. It argues that the ICTY and ICC should recognize the kinship between these domestic theories of liability, on the one hand, and JCE and joint perpetration, on the other hand. This can lead to a concept of criminal responsibility for international crimes that is better confined and more intellectually honest.

INTRODUCTION 1. The Lisbon Treaty and the Future of European Immigration and Asylum Law 2. The Politics of Irregular Migration 3. Migration Policy and EU External Relations 4. Which Borders for the EU Immigration Policy? Yardsticks of International Protection for EU Joint Borders Management 5. Integration of Immigrants in EU Law and Policy: Challenges to Rule of Law, Exceptions to Inclusion 6. Analysing European Case-Law on Migration: Options for Critical Lawyers

The only neutral method to distil the ‘performative’ (discriminating, inciting xenophobia or provoking hostility) potential of speech is essentially rooted in epistemic paternalism. It stems from the idyllic belief in some expert ability to find the truth. The imagined expert is expected to catalogue various expressions, taking into account the historical, political, socio-linguistic, forensic, and numerous other contextualizations of speech. Roughly equivalent to speech act theory, this assumption signifies that certain types of speech do not just sound or appear in the semiotic space, but carry with them an action. In this respect, the standard of proof developed by the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in hate speech cases has been largely driven by the (explicitly or implicitly cited) expert conclusions. In order to evaluate this role of experts within the standard of proof employed by the Strasbourg Court, I revisit recent (2008–2012) hate speech cases from the ECtHR and distinguish them into three streams. What unites all three streams is the epistemic convenience of the Court in granting a wide margin of appreciation to the respective States. Yet on a closer reading, it appears that Strasbourg judges have been mixing largely incompatible methodologies in order to achieve that low (non-intrusive) standard.