The ICC pre-trial chamber decision on jurisdiction over the situation in Myanmar

The transfer and deportation of ethnically Rohingya people from Myanmar into Bangladesh is a crime against humanity demanding an international response. What role, however, should the International Criminal Court (ICC) play? On 6 September 2018 an ICC Pre-Trial Chamber ruled that the Court has jurisdiction to investigate and prosecute such crimes as they are completed on the territory of a State party, Bangladesh. Myanmar is not a party to ICC Statute and has invoked the principle that treaties do not bind third parties without their consent. The case put in this commentary is that while the Pre-Trial Chamber’s approach to the law was arguable as an interpretation of the ICC Statute, it was unwise as a matter of policy. The argument is threefold. First, the Pre-Trial Chamber’s ruling is as a matter of legal method only the first-move in a process of norm-creation and persuasion. Second, it does not follow that because territorial jurisdiction in international law includes ‘objective’ jurisdiction over transboundary acts completed on a State’s territory that such jurisdiction was delegated by member States to the ICC in all cases. Finally, it is argued that international criminal tribunals do not succeed when the cooperation of necessary territorial governments (here, Myanmar) is withheld. Proceeding in this case risks becoming a quagmire of the ICC’s own creation at a time when it can little afford further risks to its legitimacy.     

French economists and Bernese agrarians: The marquis de Mirabeau and the economic society of Berne

Physiocracy is still sometimes seen as an oddly archaic programme of agricultural development. The aim of this paper is to show that one of the Physiocrats’ prime concerns was to take the subject of agriculture out of international relations. The fiscal regime that was central to Physiocracy was designed to make every large territorial state self-sufficient and, by doing so, to break the connection between modern great power politics, the international division of labour, and the politics of necessity. From this perspective, the memorandum that Victor Riqueti, marquis de Mirabeau, sent to the Berne Economic Society in 1759, contains an early indication of what, had the Physiocratic programme ever been implemented in full, a world reformed on Physiocratic lines might have looked like.     

宋朝的配隶法与厢军中的配军

宋朝的配军制度,是建立在配隶法基础上的强制罪犯充军的集兵制度,是宋代兵制中于募兵制之外又一个值得注意的特点。配隶法自宋初实行以后,逐步成为一个内容繁杂、适用于各种犯罪的刑种。两宋时期的厢军是配军数量较多的军种,配军不仅集中分布在厢军的牢城营,而且在厢军其他重役军分和一般军分中都有较多分布。由于配隶法适用范围的泛化和枉法滥配现象的大量存在,宋朝牢城等配军军分的溢额成为一种常态,配军数量十分庞大。宋统治者之所以将罪犯配隶充军,很大程度上是为了直接控制一批能够服兵役和劳役、随时听候国家调遣的人力资源,配军的存在也因此具有了其自身的社会经济价值和军事价值。     

商鞅法哲学研究

法家学派在时间上有前期、后期之分,在地域上有齐法家和三晋法家之分。商鞅是前期法家名代表人物,其法学理论典型地体现于社会终极理想之中。他认为人类社会的历史可以划分为两大阶段：首先是法治化社会,以法治国,在社会高度法治化基础之上,人类有望进入其理想化阶段——道德自律社会。法的力量由中心退居边缘,伦理道德价值体系开始由边缘走向中心,道德价值体系成为人类社会最高原则。从“法治”到“德治”,这是商鞅法学理论的逻辑过程,也是商鞅法学理论的全部内涵。     

从流民法看都铎时期议会与王权的关系

都铎时期是英国从中世纪封建社会向近代资本主义社会过渡的历史大变革时期。英国虽确立了君主专制制度,但国王在政策上仍需要议会的支持,议会亦需要王权的保护。这种“互助”的关系也反映在流民立法上。当英国出现严重的流民问题时,议会颁布的一系列法令法规中充分体现了国王的意志。因此,无论是“血腥立法”还是“社会福利”立法,其根本目的都是解决社会危机,避免发生动乱,稳固统治,在这一点上议会与国土的利益是一致的,国王与议会的关系是对立统一的。     

经商与爱人--关于稻盛哲学的挑战性

稻盛和夫是日本京瓷集团公司的创始人。该公司“2001年3月的年营业额超过4兆日元(大约为2700亿元人民币)、税前利润达4500亿日元(大约为300亿元人民币)”。^[1](P3)是什么使稻盛和夫在经营上成就这一辉煌伟业的呢?这便是,由以“敬天爱人”的基本思想为核心构架而成的稻盛经营哲学;以及靠商业伦理道德成为赢家的超凡境界。     

Playing Politics with Sex Offender Laws: An Event History Analysis of the Initial Community Notification Laws across American States

Despite a decline in crime rates, the 1990s witnessed extensive media coverage of several high‐profile stranger abductions and murders of children. State legislators' swift response to the public's growing fear of sex offenders with the adoption of sex offender registration and notification (SORN) laws raises questions about the role of politics. Punctuated equilibrium theory and the diffusion of innovation jointly provide a context to conduct an event history analysis to assess the extent to which politics enhanced legislative responsiveness to public opinion in SORN policymaking. Contrary to the commonly held belief that attributes legislative interest in SORN to salient crimes against children, the results suggest that factors such as the percentage of a conservative population, district‐level competition, and state innovativeness accelerated the diffusion of innovation of the laws.     

Precarious Territory: Property Law,Housing, and the Socio-Spatial Order

Most of us access shelter over land over which other people have legally sanctioned dominant interests and powers, creating systemic relations of security and vulnerability that I term precarious property. We all live inside the territory of property, but do so under different terms. Rather than thinking of the territory of property as an exclusive space of insiders and outsiders, I think of it as a relational technology that organises forms of conditional spatial access. Territorialised expressions of law play a crucial role in organising such relations through a “property space” that frames property’s participants, their interactions, their alternatives to transacting, and the meanings of property itself. Thinking territorially about precarious property offers us both analytical and ethico-political insights, I suggest.     

Becoming Cleopatra: the forgotten Zionism of Raphael Lemkin

The biography of Raphael Lemkin has emerged of late as a highly contested lieu de memoire in charged political debates in Europe, the United States and the Middle East about the meaning, past and present, of the Holocaust and genocide. At the same time, scholars have attempted to demythologize Lemkin by reinscribing his life into its pre-World War II Polish context. Yet thus far no one has identified the precise political activities and affiliations that shaped Lemkin’s concept of genocide. In this article, I show that Lemkin, far from being a Jewish Bundist, a Polish nationalist or an apolitical cosmopolitan, was an active member of the interwar Polish Zionist movement, from which he drew the ideas that inspired his idea of the crime of genocide. In the first part of this article, I use his published writings from the 1920s and 1930s in Hebrew, Yiddish and Polish to recover a rich Jewish political framework in which his concepts of barbarism and genocide first began to emerge. In the second section, I ask how this crucial dimension of Lemkin’s life and thought vanished from the historical record, and why it has yet to be recovered in spite of the boom in biographical scholarship. Finally, I suggest how the recovery of Lemkin’s Zionism helps to reframe the current political impasse in the historiography of Holocaust and genocide studies.     

International law and ‘humanity’ in the making and unmaking of European solidarity, 1830–1915

Abstract

The Janus-faced character of nineteenth-century Europe presents unique challenges to historians. Concurrent to spiralling industrial growth, working-class revolts, transatlantic migration and imperialism, the stark social and economic upheaval of the period has virtually belied the solidarity achieved on the Continent. In recent years, however, a number of superlative scholarly studies have excavated and illuminated the intellectual, legal and technological revolutions that ushered in an era of promise and potential unity. In this article, the author examines the degree of interdependence and interconnectedness across the Continent and the world by melding extant scholarship, introducing primary-source research, and offering new perspectives on the relationship of the increasingly globalized world and the European efforts to harness its potential by attempting to create lasting norms for peace and prosperity through international law and the benchmark concept of ‘humanity’.