The 2013 CJICL conference "Legal Tradition in a Diverse World" is taking place this weekend (18-19 May) in Cambridge. The conference will begin on Saturday morning with a keynote address by Judge Abdulqawi Yusuf of the ICJ. At lunchtime on Saturday Professor Patrick Glenn will deliver a guest lecture on the topic "The State as a Legal Tradition" and launch his new book "The Cosmopolitan State" by Oxford University Press.

Sunday morning sees a debate between Professor James Crawford and Professor Alain Pellet on the topic "Anglo-American v Continental Traditions in Advocacy at International Courts and Tribunals." The debate will be moderated by Professor Catherine Redgwell.

More than 50 papers will be presented in over a dozen panels covering a wide range of topics, including IHL, transitional justice, the teaching of law, EU law, economic development, legal procedure and critical legal studies.

The full conference programme is available here:

http://www.cjicl.org.uk/conference

Anyone wishing to attend who hasn't yet registered may sign up for the last remaining places via the CJICL conference website: www.cjicl.org.uk/conference

Those unable to attend can follow some of the conference highlights via the CJICL Blog Twitter account: https://twitter.com/CJICLBlog

Highlights of the conference will be tweeted using the hashtag #CJICL2013

We look forward to seeing many of you in Cambridge.

From 18-19 April, I attended the inaugural London International Boundaries Conference. It was a superb conference, involving excellent presentations from a variety of practitioners on technical and legal aspects of boundary delimitation. Sitting at the back of the room at one point, I was struck by the fact that the majority of the audience was made up of white men in grey suits. Boundary delimitation is a man’s world, it seemed.

A quick scan of Twitter during the conference provided some welcome news. I was very happy to read that President Obama had nominated Avril Haines as the next Legal Adviser of the State Department. If her appointment is confirmed, she will fill the vacancy created by the departure of Harold Koh, the former Legal Adviser. Koh returned to Yale Law School in January 2013 as Sterling Professor of International Law.

This is the final post of the series on pending Annex VII arbitrations and will provide a brief report on the Argentina/Ghana arbitration. Incidentally, distinct from Annex VII, another inter-State arbitration is currently pending before the PCA, that of Croatia/Slovenia (Territorial and Maritime Dispute). The parties filed Memorials on 11 February 2013 and are due to file Counter-Memorials on 11 November 2013.  A hearing before the Arbitral Tribunal is to be held in mid-2014. The arbitral panel is composed of Judge Gilbert Guillaume, Professor Vaughan Lowe, Judge Bruno Simma, Dr Jernej Sekolec and Professor Budislav Vukas.

Argentina/Ghana (Detention of the ARA Libertad)

Initiated: 29 October 2012 by Argentina

Arbitrators appointed by the President of ITLOS on 4 February 2013: Bruno Simma (Germany)(President); Awn Shawkat Al Khasawneh (Jordan) and Bernard Oxman (USA).

The choice of arbitrators by the parties is not publicly available as far as I am aware, but likely candidates are Judge Kelly (Argentina) for Argentina and Thomas Mensah (Ghana) for Ghana, as Professor Mensah was chosen by Ghana to be Judge ad hoc at the ITLOS provisional measures hearings.

Following a previous post on the Philippines/China Annex VII arbitration, this post will provide a status report for two further Annex VII arbitrations, namely Bangladesh/India and Mauritius/UK.

Bangladesh/India (Bay of Bengal Territorial and Maritime Dispute)

Initiated:          8 October 2009 by Bangladesh

Arbitrators:      

Bangladesh: Professor Thomas A. Mensah (Ghana)

India: Dr Pemmaraju Sreenivasa Rao (India)

12 February 2010 (ITLOS President): Professor Rüdiger Wolfrum (Germany)(President); Professor Ivan Shearer (UK) and Professor Tullio Treves (Italy).

Status of submissions: Bangladesh filed its Memorial May 2011; India filed a Counter-Memorial in May 2012. Bangladesh filed a Reply on 2 February 2013.

The first award of an UNCLOS Annex VII arbitral tribunal was rendered in 2006 in the Barbados/Trinidad and Tobago case. There are now four pending arbitrations under Annex VII, which raise a diverse range of issues, both substantive and procedural, and not limited to the law of the sea. Law of the sea is often viewed as niche area within public international law, and in some quarters has a reputation akin to that of EU law or WTO law, as being highly technical and somewhat dull. Nevertheless, the issues raised in the pending Annex VII arbitrations will be of interest to all public international lawyers, and the words UNCLOS or Annex VII should not act as a deterrent to reading more about these cases. Over the coming week, a series of posts will provide a status report on the four pending Annex VII arbitrations and note key dates arising in 2013/14 in that regard. Today's post will deal with the Philippines/China arbitration, following the confirmation provided today by the Department of Foreign Affairs of the Philippines that the ITLOS President has nominated an arbitrator on behalf of China. Further posts this week will provide a status update on Bangladesh/India, Mauritius/UK and Argentina/Ghana. These are exciting times for State-to-State arbitration, and not just for law of the sea enthusiasts.

This post examines some aspects of the decision in the case “Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v Colombia)” issued by the ICJ on 19 November 2012. Nicaragua had requested the Court to determine sovereignty over several maritime features in the Caribbean Sea and to carry out a maritime delimitation of the continental shelf between Nicaragua and Colombia. The Court had previously decided, at the preliminary measures stage of the case, that the 1928 Barcenas-Esguerra Treaty between the two countries did not effect a general delimitation of the maritime boundary. In the decision of 19 November 2012, the Court carried out a maritime delimitation unlikely to have been predicted by either party, departing slightly from what had become an expected methodology.

As outlined in a previous post, Argentina has applied to ITLOS for provisional measures regarding the Argentine navy ship ARA Libertad, currently detained in Ghana. The Tribunal is due to hold public hearings on the request for provisional measures beginning on Thursday, 29 November 2012. The purpose of this post is to set out the legal issues surrounding the granting of provisional measures by the Tribunal, so as to evaluate the submissions made by Argentina and Ghana during public hearings.

Jurisdiction

The request for provisional measures arises in the context of an arbitration initiated by Argentina under Annex VII of UNCLOS. 

On 14 November 2012 Argentina submitted a request for provisional measures to the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (‘ITLOS’) regarding the dispute over the Frigate ARA Libertad. Argentina has requested “that Ghana unconditionally enable the Argentine warship Frigate ARA Libertad to leave the Tema port and the jurisdictional waters of Ghana and to be resupplied to that end.” On 29 October 2012, Argentina instituted arbitral proceedings under Annex VII of UNCLOS against Ghana. Article 290(5) of UNCLOS provides that pending the constitution of an arbitral tribunal to which a dispute is being submitted under Annex VII, any party to the dispute may request ITLOS to prescribe provisional measures. ITLOS may prescribe provisional measures if it considers that prima facie the arbitral tribunal would have jurisdiction and that the urgency of the situation so requires.

The ICJ has announced that it will deliver its judgment in the Territorial and Maritime Dispute (Nicaragua v Colombia) case on Monday 19^th November 2012. In advance of the judgment, this post will run through the history of this relatively long-running case and outline the main issues in dispute between the parties.

Following our previous post on selection of a candidate for election to the International Court of Justice (ICJ), this post looks at the election process itself. As set out in the statute of the ICJ, five judges are elected to the Court every three years, for a nine-year term.

 On 30 October 2012 the Australian Government announced its support for the candidature of Professor James Crawford, Whewell Professor of International Law at the University of Cambridge, for election as a judge to the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Given the nomination of Professor Crawford for the 2014 election, a post outlining the selection procedure for ICJ elections is timely.