Columbia Journal of Transnational Law

New York, Feb. 6, 2012—M. Cherif Bassiouni, who helped create the International Criminal Court in The Hague, will receive the Wolfgang Friedmann Memorial Award from the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law at an award dinner on April 3.

Since 1975 the Columbia Journal of Transnational Law has presented the Wolfgang Friedmann Memorial Award to a distinguished scholar or practitioner who has made outstanding contributions to the field of international law.

“We are thrilled to have as this year’s Friedmann Award recipient a person with such stature and expertise in the field of international criminal justice,” said P. Nicholas Kourides ’71, deputy general counsel of American International Group, Inc., and a member of the journal’s board of directors.

“Professor Bassiouni’s contributions to the creation of the International Criminal Court are widely acclaimed,” Kourides added. “He has written extensively on violations of human rights and criminal law and is one of the renowned authorities in this field. Being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the field of international criminal law is confirmation of his significant contributions.”

Cherif Bassiouni

Bassiouni, who was born in Cairo, is a distinguished research professor of law emeritus at DePaul University College of Law in Chicago. As a practicing lawyer, he has handled many international cases on extradition and international cooperation in criminal matters, and coordinated complex litigation on matters involving international law. He has served the United Nations in a number of capacities and has been a consultant to the U.S. Department of State and U.S. Department of Justice.

In 1999, Bassiouni was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in the field of international criminal justice and for his contribution to the creation of the International Criminal Court.

“I am honored to follow a long line of distinguished recipients of an award which preserves the memory of a distinguished internationalist,” Bassiouni said.

Former Friedmann award recipients have included George Mitchell, the former U.S. special envoy for Middle East peace, and Boutros Boutros-Ghali, the former secretary-general of the United Nations.

The award is given in memory of the Journal’s founder, Columbia Law School Professor Wolfgang Friedmann. Friedmann, a native of Germany, emigrated to the United States and taught at the Law School from 1955 until his death in 1972. He passionately advocated for a world order based on mutual respect among nations, and is best known for his denunciations of the Nazi Party when he worked as a jurist in Germany in the early 1930s.

Founded in 1961, the Journal has showcased the work of generations of international law scholars. It now has more than 1,000 subscribers, one-third of whom live outside the U.S. in more than 60 countries.

Delegates recently convened in Kampala, Uganda to lay the groundwork for the International Criminal Court’s eventual prosecution of the crime of aggression. This achievement caps decades of negotiations that began in the post-World War II period. From virtually the beginning of the negotiations, it was argued that an aggression prosecution should not go forward absent some definitive showing that a state had committed a predicate act of aggression. Delegations diverged on which body—the Security Council or the court itself—should be empowered to determine whether a predicate act of aggression had occurred and whether it was necessary for the putative aggressor state(s), the victim state(s), or both, to have consented to the court’s jurisdiction before a prosecution could proceed. The end product was an unimpeachable regime of state consent that completely insulates the nationals of Non-Party States from prosecution and allows States Parties to opt out of the crime entirely. The results achieved in Kampala have subtly eroded the primacy of the Security Council, as states revealed a preference for a consent-based regime and a willingness to extend international criminal jurisdiction to their own nationals and over their own foreign policies. Indeed, the aggression amendments may have actually diminished the efficacy of the Council’s pre-existing referral power and created the potential for greater conflict between the Council and the court. The outcome in Kampala thus presents a microcosm of the continual thinning of state sovereignty and the indelible shift in the balance between power and law in international relations. This Article examines the aggression amendments and the process by which they were adopted, concluding with a discussion of the way in which the negotiations and the final amendments invoked and rebalanced the central themes of power politics, state consent and judicial independence within public international law.

http://journals.cdrs.columbia.edu/jtl/?p=1145

Moving forward into a post-Kyoto world, policymakers struggle to find effective and equitable solutions, not only for the most basic challenges climate change presents, but also for the secondary problems to which climate change gives rise. After more than twenty years of deliberations, policymakers continue to struggle with the fundamental question of how to use law as a tool for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet, even as these deliberations proceed, more complex derivative questions are identified on a daily basis.

These spin-off questions range from well-established concerns about the impact of climate change on biodiversity, human health and human rights, to newer questions about the intersections between climate change law and other areas of law, to critical questions about how climate change is revealing new governance gaps. Many of these collateral questions raise pressing legal and political issues that cannot be resolved through ongoing climate negotiations. This Article examines two particularly important areas in which climate change is exposing fundamental gaps in existing systems of global governance. The first of these is governance of the Arctic Ocean at the edges of the existing regulatory reach of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. The second of these is the complete absence, for all practical purposes, of a governance regime applicable to geoengineering research and experimentation. These seemingly distinct issues are examined together for two reasons. First, they raise two of the most pressing global governance challenges today. Second, global efforts to address Arctic and geoengineering governance gaps pose discreet opportunities for the global community to debate, refine and advance the normative framework and institutional structures for management of the global commons. In both contexts, the questions asked and the answers offered will offer insight into larger questions of global environmental governance.

http://journals.cdrs.columbia.edu/jtl/?p=1150

Linkages between investment law and other areas of international law remain largely obscure. In particular, investment arbitral tribunals tend to separate investment issues from human rights issues despite the increasing number of disputes that implicate both areas. In part, this separation of issues stems from a primary focus on the economic aspects of foreign investment. Yet beyond their economic components, international investment agreements (IIAs) contain a social dimension, as foreign investment directly impacts social, political and environmental issues. Consequently, international investment law should be reconceptualized in order to realize both the economic and social aspects of foreign investment. One way to achieve these twin aims is through the use of exception provisions that allow states to derogate from their IIA obligations under specified conditions. Although human rights are generally not a specified condition allowing derogation, several types of exception provisions are broad enough to encapsulate human rights obligations in their ambit if interpreted broadly. Recently, several investment arbitral tribunals have interpreted exception provisions in investment treaties to which Argentina is a party. Using these decisions as a basis, this Article explores, first, whether there is a theoretical basis for interpreting exception provisions in IIAs in accordance with human rights norms, and second, if a theoretical basis exists, how such interpretations should proceed.

http://journals.cdrs.columbia.edu/jtl/?p=1154

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M. Cherif Bassiouni to Receive 2012 Wolfgang Friedmann Award

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