EJIL: The Podcast!

In the third episode of ‘Reckonings with Europe: Pasts and Present’, James Lowry and Meredith Terretta take up the object of archives: how law conceptualizes the archives of states; the ‘displaced’, ‘disputed’ or ‘migrated’ archives left when empires and states are reconstituted; and what state archives can and cannot tell us.

Works mentioned, in order of mention:

James Lowry (ed), Displaced Archives (Routledge, 2017) 

James Lowry (ed), Disputed Archival Heritage (forthcoming), esp chapter by J J Ghaddar, ‘Provenance in Place: Crafting the Vienna Convention for Global Decolonization and Archival Repatriation’.

Meredith Terretta, Claimants, Advocates and Disrupters in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories (forthcoming; for a sense of work to date on anticolonial advocate lawyering see ‘Claiming Land, Claiming Rights in Africa’s Internationally Supervised Territories’ in Steven L.B. Jensen and Charles Walton (eds), Social Rights and the Politics of Obligation in History (CUP, 2022) 264-286 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009008686.014; ‘Anti-Colonial Lawyering, Postwar Human Rights, and Decolonization across Imperial Boundaries in Africa’. Canadian Journal of History 52(3), 448-478 (2017)).

James Lowry, ‘Radical empathy, the imaginary and affect in (post)colonial records: how to break out of international stalemates on displaced archives’. Archival Science 19, 185–203 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09305-z

(For concise background on the ‘migrated archives’, see James Lowry & Mandy Banton / Association of Commonwealth Archivists and Records Managers position paper).

Umut Özsu, ‘Determining New Selves: Mohammed Bedjaoui on Algeria, Western Sahara, and Post-Classical International Law’ in Jochen von Bernstorff and Philipp Dann (eds), The Battle for International Law: South–North Perspectives on the Decolonization Era (OUP, 2019) DOI:10.1093/oso/9780198849636.003.0016.

Stanley H Griffin (with Jeannette A Bastian & John A Aarons) (eds), Decolonizing the Caribbean Record: An Archives Reader (Litwin, 2018) (and forthcoming work in Displaced Archives, above).  

This episode accompanies the launching of a new rubric in the European Journal of International Law – Legal/Illegal. The first installment of Legal/Illegal, which appears in issue 32(4), focuses on the question whether the use of force by a state to recover a territory that has been occupied for many years may be considered a lawful act of self-defence. In the Podcast, Michal Saliternik interviews the authors of this section: Tom Ruys and Felipe Rodriguez Silvestre on the illegal side, and Dapo Akande and Antonios Tzanakopoulos on the legal side. Beginning with the second Nagorno-Karabakh war, passing through the conflicts over the Falkland Islands, the Golan Heights, Northern Cyprus, and the Chagos Islands, and concluding with the Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories, they discuss the compatibility of forcible recovery of an occupied territory with the self-defence immediacy and necessity requirements as well as with the obligation to settle territorial disputes through peaceful means. They also discuss questions of justice and fairness, both towards the conflicting states and towards the inhabitants of the occupied territory.

In this episode Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb, joined by Rebecca Barber and Mike Becker, examine various aspects of Russia’s war on Ukraine. The discussion begins with an evaluation of Russia’s legal justification for invading Ukraine, moving to an analysis of the responses to Russia’s aggression by the UN General Assembly and the Security Council. We then turn to the proceedings brought by Ukraine against Russia before the International Court of Justice pursuant to the Genocide Convention, the investigation initiated by the Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, the commission of inquiry created by the Human Rights Council, and the pros and cons of an initiative to set up a Special Tribunal for the Crime of Aggression. 

In this second instalment of the 'Reckonings with Europe: Pasts and Present' series, Evelien Campfens, Chika Okeke-Agulu and Dan Hicks reflect on calls for return of cultural artefacts looted under European empire. How does (international) law respond to these calls? Does law even matter—and if so which kind? Who resists return, and why? And what might return mean today?

Select texts and reports discussed:

Felwine Sarr & Bénédicte Savoy, 'The Restitution of African Cultural Heritage. Toward a New Relational Ethics' (French original) (2018)

Association of Art Museum Directors, 'Declaration on the Importance and Value of Universal Museums' (2002)

Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museum: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (2020)

Evelien Campfens, https://www.boomdenhaag.nl/isbn/9789462362505 (Cross-Border Claims to Cultural Heritage: Property or Heritage?) (2021)

In this episode Dapo Akande, Marko Milanovic and Philippa Webb discuss the legal issues that arise from targeted killings conducted by states outside their territory. They begin with a discussion of the recent blockbuster judgment of the European Court of Human Rights in the case concerning the killing in London in 2006 of the Russian dissident Alexander Litvinenko. They talk about how the Court dealt with the attribution of the killing to Russia and then explore the extraterritorial application of human rights treaties obligations - a question on which many courts and treaty bodies have given inconsistent answers. The podcast then moves on to the legal issues that would arise if the courts of the territorial state were to seek to exercise jurisdiction over the individuals accused of committing the killing or over the state that sent them. Would those individuals be entitled to the immunity from foreign criminal jurisdiction which those who act on behalf of a state are normally entitled to? If not, why not and how does the ongoing work of International Law Commission on immunity deal with this issue?

In this episode of the podcast, Joseph Weiler is joined by Helene Ruiz-Fabri, Photini Pazartzis and Marko Milanovic, to discuss the EJIL’s sister institution, the European Society of International Law (ESIL) – its foundation, mission, governance, and plans for the future, including the forthcoming annual conference in Stockholm.

Whatever happened to International Law & Democracy? Accompanying the Symposium on that question in EJIL issue 32(1), this podcast contains a duel between anti-anti-international-law& democracy scholar Akbar Rasulov and anti-international law & democracy scholar Brad Roth. Hosted by EJIL Editor in Chief Sarah Nouwen, they disagree on the curious fate of international law & democracy, on the politics of form versus the politics of substance and the role of the international lawyer.

Which author of a legal monograph has not had that frustrating feeling -- Why is my book not getting reviewed (and his or her book is...!)? And yet, in one of the many exquisite paradoxes of academic life, all Book Review editors of legal journals will attest to the difficulty of getting colleagues to accept to do a book review. 'I have to read that book carefully (i.e. going beyond the index and checking if I am cited and whether the engagement with my work is ok) and then write a couple of pages which count for nothing in the current lamentable state of quantitative academic appointments and promotions? Thank you but no thank you is the usual reply. We want our books reviewed but we don't like reviewing books. Or as readers of legal book reviews -- have you ever had the frustrating feeling of 'I want to read about the book and this reviewer is just using it to inflict on us his own thoughts and ideas'. Or the opposite -- if I want to read a description of the book I can go to the publisher's website (or the author's homepage...). Why is this review so bland and lacking in critical bite? 

These are just some of the issues that Cait Storr, Fuad Zarbiyev, EJIL book review editor Christian Tams and EJIL editors in Chief Sarah Nouwen and Joseph Weiler discuss in this EJIL Live! The podcast accompanies issue 31.4 which contains a 'Bumper' Book Review section. At the end of the podcast, plans for another EJIL innovation are revealed…

In this new series, 'Reckonings with Europe: Pasts and Present', Surabhi Ranganathan and Megan Donaldson host conversations about enduring legacies of empire, capitalism, and racism in international law and the legal academy. Joined by Matthew Smith, Mezna Qato, and Rahul Rao, they open the series with a discussion about statues, less tangible legacies woven into institutions, and the place of law in struggles about pasts and futures.

In this podcast, EJIL editor Sarah Nouwen interviews Laurence Helfer and Erik Voeten about their article “Walking Back Human Rights in Europe?”, published in EJIL issue 31(3). What does it mean to “walk back human rights”? One day one has a human right and the next day no longer? And how does one assess whether human rights are being walked back? But also: how does one keep a single voice in a co-authored text?