It is August 26, 2015. A crucial day during the Conference of State Parties in Cancún, Mexico. 67 of the 69 member states of the Arms Trade Treaty vote for a location of the new Secretariat. Three candidate host states and their cities are bidding: Austria (Vienna), Switzerland (Geneva), and Trinidad and Tobago (Port of Spain). In the first round, Port of Spain wins with 32 votes, Geneva gets 21, and Vienna drops out with 14 votes. The second round, Geneva gets 35, scooping up all of Viennaâ...

Climate change poses tremendous legal challenges. The law is still largely unsettled. Seeing the global consequences of GHG emissions, many enterprises may face litigation before courts in multiple jurisdictions. The outcome of these cases is often hard to predict. It is in the best interest of humankind and the environment to create global obligations, for instance in the form of concrete obligations of States and enterprises, which can be applied by courts around the globe. Using a myriad o...

Robert Spano’s career at the Strasbourg Court is exceptional, as only three and a half years after his arrival, he was elected Section President, then Vice-President of the Court before taking up the post of President on 18 May 2020.

In his role, he has put his untiring energy at the service of the protection of human rights in Europe. While his qualities as a judge were known and appreciated by all his colleagues, as was his inexhaustible knowledge of case-law, during his term as Preside...

International crimes cause widespread victimisation and destruction, leading to social disruption that may take generations to repair. Over the years, the international community has established international courts to end the culture of impunity in relation to such crimes and to enforce a culture of accountability. A critical success factor for these courts is to ensure that they are perceived as legitimate in post-conflict societies.

Established after the 1994 genocide against the Tutsi eth...

Addiction is pervasively present within the criminal justice sector, resulting in legal professionals regularly dealing with addicted defendants. Yet addiction is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, resulting in controversies regarding its conceptualisation, and thus difficulties in addressing addiction-related crime in court. Over the last decades, addiction has increasingly been conceptualised as a brain disease, which arguably could alter the law’s current approach towards the crimin...

What practical problems are at stake in current EAW surrender proceedings? The research project Improving Mutual Recognition of European Arrest Warrants through Common Practical Guidelines of which the three country reports for Greece, the Netherlands and Poland are now published, is a follow-up of an earlier project that led to the publication of The European Arrest Warrant and In Absentia Judgments, Maastricht Law Series No.12 In AbsentiEAW. This project is broader than in absentia alone an...

The ImprovEAW-project concerns European Arrest Warrant proceedings in seven Member States (Belgium, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, the Netherlands, Poland and Romania). Maastricht Law Series No. 23 contains the country reports for Greece, the Netherlands and Poland. ImprovEAW is a follow up to an earlier project that focused on In Absentia Judgments (Maastricht Law Series No. 12). This book looks at various other aspects of the EAW surrender procedure that are problematic in practice, such as the ...

Law finds its roots in human experience and its expression in language. It cannot be administered, studied or taught without the instrumentality of language. The focus on language enlarges and deepens comparative studies. This volume features a wide array of comparative perspectives encompassing Law and Language, inviting readers to deepen their understanding of their many interactions, casting new lights that benefit jurists and linguists alike. It invites to interdisciplinary collaboration,...

When Christopher Columbus (circa 1451-1506) arrived at the Bahamas in 1492, it could hardly be predicted that this would result in the most dramatic upheaval in the history of the American continent and the nearby islands. The encounter with the new world inaugurated an era of conquest, colonisation, and economic exploitation by European powers that would last for several centuries. Large numbers of Europeans settled in these newly acquired territories, bringing along their own culture and re...

This volume contains the proceedings of the 64th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space held virtually in October 2021, as well as the report of the IISL Standing Committee on the Status of International Agreements Relating to Activities in Outer Space.