Critical International Law Speaker Series

Convenors: Monica Garcia-Salmones and Wim Muller
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The aim is to invite leading Critical International Law scholars to Maastricht and discuss and debate cutting-edge questions in the theory of international law. Critical International Law has been indispensable in bringing contemporary questions on the relationship between international law and issues such as global justice, the legacy of colonialism, post-colonial globalisation, race, gender, the position of the Global South and the realignment of the global order to the attention of mainstream international legal scholars. The goal of the speaker series is to spark deep critical thinking on these questions. 

Dr Carl E. Lewis

Title: Litigation in the Universal Interest

Dr Carl E. Lewis is a researcher in International Law at the T.M.C. Asser Institute, The Hague, currently focusing on Public International Law, International Human Rights Law (especially issues raised by Neurotechnological advancements) and international adjudication.

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Abstract

For critical legals scholars, contemporary invocations of the ‘international community’ are looked upon with suspicion. Yet, in 2024, two very different international courts – the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) – delivered orders and judgments in cases that called for them to consider the existence of obligations owed by states to the international community as a whole. For the ICJ, this concerned allegations of a breach of obligations erga omnes in South Africa v Israel. Whilst the ECtHR, in Duarte Agostinho, was challenged to consider the potentially “…unlimited expansion of States’ extraterritorial jurisdiction under the Convention and responsibilities under the Convention towards people practically anywhere in the world.”[1] In this talk, I will begin by presenting these two cases as contemporary examples of how procedural limits can stifle juridical struggles for ‘international community’, before exploring a radical counterfactual approach to strategic litigation inspired by al Attar’s call for a “decoloniality approach to counterfactuals and to critical international legal theory [that] would highlight the embedded nature of the Western imaginary and the importance of challenging those very elements that make the most sense.”


 

[1] ECtHR, Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and 32 Others 39371/20, decision of 9 April 2024, para 208.

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