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Völkerrechtsblog

Despite minimal prospects of success, international lawyers spent the first few months of the global pandemic discussing whether the rules of state responsibility could be invoked against states, especially China, for their acts and omissions regarding COVID-19. In this piece, we take these debates seriously, if not necessarily literally. We argue that the unrealistic nature of these debates does not make them irrelevant. Rather, we propose an ideology critique of state responsibility as a legal field. Our approach is two-fold. First, we argue these debates need to be situated within the rise of geopolitical competition between the US and its allies on the one hand and China on the other. In this context, state responsibility is always laid at the feet of one’s opponents. Secondly, we posit that my emphasising the role of states, recourse to state responsibility renders invisible the role of transnational processes of capitalist production and exchange that have profound effects on nature and set the stage for the emergence and spread of infectious diseases. Drawing from the work of the geographer Neil Smith, we argue against the ‘naturalisation’ of disasters performed much of the international legal discourse about COVID-19.

Völkerrechtsblog

Völkerrechtsblog

The abstract is included in the text.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the different historical and geographical contexts in which extraterritorial regimes have developed, the myriad political and economic pressures in response to which such regimes have grown, the highly uneven distributions of extraterritorial privilege that have resulted from these processes. It demonstrates that assertions of legal authority ‘beyond’ territorial frontiers have always played a central role in the constitution and consolidation of sovereignty. The book explains extra-territorial jurisdiction in the legal strategies and ‘state spaces’ of US empire, both before and after the Second World War. It also explores the question of the extraterritorial application of the European Convention of Human Rights, one of the most controversial issues faced by the Strasbourg court. The book is concerned with the limitations of thinking about legal obligations through the prism of extraterritoriality.

Submission to the UN Working Group on Business and Human Rights, Annual Business and Human Rights Forum 2018.

Völkerrechtsblog

This article intervenes in the growing academic discussion about the potential impact of currently negotiated trade and investment agreements such as the TTIP, the CETA, and the TPP. To do so, our contribution focuses on the rarely asked question of how these agreements will impact the Global South. After showing that there is no stable and clear international legal definition of a ‘developing’ state, this contribution argues that the EU already has a number of legal obligations towards the Global South (for example, the Cotonou Agreement) that need to inform the debate about the objectives and potential impact of the TTIP. Further, our argument emanates from the position that it was the failure of the Doha Development Round of negotiations in the WTO that paved way for what we understand to be a ‘strategic bilateralism’ of the Global North. The second part of this article attempts to evaluate the potential impact of this strategic bilateralism on three distinct fields, first, on the relations between the West and emerging peripheral powers, such as China or Brazil; second, on the economic stability and viability of the Least Developed Countries; and third, on the most marginalised and vulnerable sections of the society regardless of their nationality. Our tentative conclusion is that given the potential adverse impact on all these three fronts, it is essential for the EU to re-evaluate its strategy.