Global Justice _ Public International Law

Welcome back everybody to our lectures in public international law. In this video we're going to spend some time talking about the concept of global justice and the relationship between global justice and the desire for a world that is regulated by international law. Fundamentally, this is going to represent, depending on how you view it, either the last video on the theoretical underpinnings of international law or potentially the penultimate lesson on the theoretical underpinnings, because the next lecture is going to be concerned with the question of fragmentation, the fragmentation issue in international law, something that permeates all aspects of public international law and so I thought was relevant for this first series of lectures on the topic. What we're going to do in this lecture specifically is focus on what global justice is. We'll talk about its definition, we'll talk about some of the key questions that are raised, we'll talk about some of the main debates that really underpin this dichotomy, if you will, between the cosmopolitan approach to global justice and this idea of statism within broader philosophical justice debates more broadly. We'll then talk about global justice and international law. We'll talk about the ways in which international law is informed by questions of global justice, the interrelationship between the two, some of the normative considerations associated with this relationship, before then thinking about case studies. There are three case studies I would like to think about specifically. The first of these is an actual case, the Netherlands climate litigation case. The second is this idea of economic justice and international law and what we will do there is think about the interconnectivity between this lecture series on public international law and the lecture series that is running in conjunction with this which is on the subject of international economic law, something that's very very important and the question of economic justice and global justice within IEL is also something that we're exploring in that particular series of lessons. And then the final case study concerns a very recent piece of international legal development which is the much awaited and much written about already subject on the advisory opinion from the ICJ, the climate change advisory opinion concerning the obligations of states in relation to the question of climate change. How does this have a relationship with international law? Well it's obviously an advisory opinion but how does this then have a relationship to global justice? All of these things are going to be explored in this lecture but it's probably first important to begin with asking the question about what global justice actually is and that's what I want to spend the majority of this lesson looking at, the majority of this lecture exploring. The question of global justice, the definition and scope of the question, the key components of this question, some of the central issues as well as the theoretical perspectives. So broadly speaking then, global justice is a normative concept in political philosophy and the philosophy of law and in broad even international relations theory that really gives us ideas concerning the issue of fairness and equality and rights and the central belief within the framework of global justice is this idea that these concepts, the idea of rights and equality and fairness, are concepts that don't just exist within the nation state. According to literature that predates a lot of this conversation regarding global justice, a lot of political philosophy, a lot of justice literature has been written about the ideas of justice, theories of justice which are very state-centric that understand the state as the sort of contours from which we have our philosophical discussion. The basic ideas in which justice is going to be established and regulated only takes place within the state. The framework of global justice however spends a bit more time and thinks a little bit more about how these principles of justice might extend to and exist beyond the state. Now there are various different reasons why this is, in my opinion, a necessary consideration. One of these is of course the growing concerns of international issues that are justice related to things like climate justice, things like economic justice, things like global poverty. In a world that is becoming increasingly globalized, as we've noted in our lecture on international economic law, we can see that there is the interconnecting of people and the crossing of borders as a result of that of issues. That's another issue that we need to think about. Now literature on global justice is often distinguished from the subject of international justice. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia, a distinction is often drawn between global and international justice. The key point of difference between these two notions involves clarifying the entities among which justice is sought. In international justice, the nation or the state is taken as the central entity of concern, and justice among nations or states is the focus. However, by contrast then, in the domain of global justice, theorists do not seek primarily to define justice between states or nations. This is very very interesting, because this distinguishing between global justice and international justice, with the latter being justice existing between states, whereas global justice by contrast therefore takes individuals, human beings, as the primary objects of concern, regardless of nationality. A simpler description might give us something of an idea that global justice refers to concepts of fairness in relations to systems on a worldwide scale. A paper that was published by Yale on what is global justice notes that global justice, the increasingly widespread expression of, marks an important shift in the structure of our moral discourse. The traditional lens presents fair agreements among sovereign states, the new lens shows a deeply unjust global institutional order that enriches elites in both poor and rich countries, while perpetuating the oppression and impoverishment of the majority of the human population. This position of global justice then, seeks to essentially define the issue, or provide a greater definition of the issue. Global justice is about looking at the world in which we live and seeing clearly unjust elements of society, seeing climate change become a major question that is of existential concern, seeing poverty, global poverty, being a major issue of existential concern. So too is the trampling over on human rights regulations, on labor regulations, things concerning human trafficking and slavery. These are all issues that are of global concern. So, if they are issues of global concern, then a just settlement of these issues, achieving justice in that regard, must surely come from a global perspective as well. When we think about then what global justice entails, what does a good theory of global justice seek to do? Well, it seeks to firstly identify what the problems are that count as global justice issues. What are the kinds of things that global justice is concerned in? What kinds of questions, what kinds of problems, what kinds of issues do we look at and think, well, that must be a global justice problem? What are the solutions to these problems? How do we think about alleviating global poverty? How do we think about combating and attacking climate change? How do we identify the agents and the individuals involved in this problem, whether the individuals who have responsibilities or the people who are responsible for said problem? So, states, individuals, corporations increasingly, institutions. And then we go and shift from looking at the descriptive, looking at what the problem is, how we might be able to solve these problems, who might we have to think about engaging to solve these problems? We then shift to the normative. Who is engaged in these problems? What ought these agents do? What should be done in relation to solving and tackling these global justice issues? And then finally provide normative grounding. Why? Why is it the case that we should do this in this particular way? If we can answer these questions in a way that is adequate, then we have a pretty good theory of global justice. And in answering the first question, what should count as an important problem of global justice? Well, I've already mentioned that there are a great number of issues that exist within this broader sphere of international relations. Things concerning global poverty and inequality, for example. What, for example, obligations do people in rich countries have towards those in poor countries? Why is it the case that the top whatever percent, 0.1 percent of the population have so much more, they have 30, 40, 50 percent of the total wealth in the world, depending on how you want to measure it and how and specifically niche you want to go. Surely this level of inequality, surely this level of rise ever so slightly, surely this is not a situation that is just. And so when we think about people who are starving in foreign countries in the global south, for example, what obligations do we as people in the global north have towards those poorer countries? This then leads to other questions like, for example, distributive justice on a global scale. How should resources, opportunities, burdens be distributed globally? If we are thinking about distributive justice as this framework from which we can analyse global issues, how ought it be the case that resources and wealth and opportunities, how can we distribute these in a way that is just? How can we distribute them such that there isn't this growing inequality issue? These two broad conversations refer to things like global justice and poverty and the issue of poverty and economic rights. Fundamentally, we're going to be explaining and going into the issue of poverty and economic rights when we look at this lecture on international economic law. That's why I've mentioned that this lecture specifically is deeply interconnected to the lecture on the lectures, the whole lecture series on international economic law, because of this exact reason, because of this exact rationale. But we also could connect this particular lecture to other issues and to other future lecture series that I'm going to be doing in the future, and may have already done by the time you come to watch this lesson. For example, human rights, how is it that we recognise rights and beyond distribution, how do we respect for and include rights in our basic framework? What kind of rights ought to be protected? Are we talking about social and economic rights? Are we talking about political rights? Are we talking about cultural rights? Are we talking about group rights? Do these human rights frameworks have equal merit, have equal weight in terms of their importance? Traditionally and historically, political rights tend to have more prevalence or seem to have more prevalence than economic, social and cultural rights. But at the very least, these two frameworks are at least entrenched by treaty law in the twin covenants, the covenants on political rights and on economic, social and cultural rights. What about new rights? What kind of new rights may exist and how do we enforce human rights on this global scale? This lecture can also be integrated in another future lecture series that I'm going to do on international environmental law. What about global environmental justice? What are the responsibilities of states when it comes to issuing issues concerning climate change, the distribution of resources and climate justice? One of the things that we will find and discover and we will look at in future slides in this lecture, in fact, is the fact that climate change does not affect every single nation state equally. It is countries in the global south that are on the equator. It is countries that have greater food insecurity, greater water insecurity, greater sanitation insecurity that will be firstly most affected by the damage of climate change. And this provides for what is fundamentally a particularly unjust issue. Why is it the case that the countries, the states, the nations that were most intimately involved in perpetuating climate change are the ones that are going to suffer the least, at least at the start? It is the countries that had the least to do with climate change, countries in the global south, that are going to suffer the wraths of climate change first and most prevalently. This seems to be particularly unjust, so how can we integrate global justice standards into our understanding of international environmental law and the law of the environment? I've already mentioned global economic justice, we'll get to that as part of the case study in a future slide, but then finally institutional justice. Do global institutions, for example, like trade regimes, the World Trade Organization, or international organizations like the United Nations, or even potentially criminal justice organizations like the International Criminal Court, do they embed within their basic framework a sense of unfairness? Do they perpetuate injustice? When we look, for example, at international investment law and the rules associated with bilateral investment treaties and the work of the Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes, we can see that there are definitely ways in which international investment law protects investors at a greater rate and with more proficiency than that of the host state, the state that hosts the investment, often a global south state. With this in mind then, let's take a shift from the broader conversation about global justice and start thinking about some actual detailed philosophical perspectives. And there are two dichotomies, if you will, on these perspectives. One is known as cosmopolitanism, and broadly speaking, cosmopolitanism is the view that all human beings, no matter where they live, matter morally, and they matter equally, and therefore have claims to justice. And because we're talking about on a global scale, these are global justice claims. The opposite approach is sometimes known as the status approach. These kinds of groupings of positions are those who maintain that justice is mainly within the state, is a domestic issue, and that global obligations, our obligations towards others, are much weaker. And this is obviously a debate that is pitted between cosmopolitan and status accounts. And this is really what we're thinking about. We're thinking about how we might have these kinds of obligations towards certain groups, how these obligations fundamentally are shaped. To what extent do I have a normative obligation towards people who live in different countries to me? These are kinds of questions that we're thinking about. And the cosmopolitan approach, fundamentally then, tells us that all human beings are fundamental units of moral concern. We're not talking about, when we get to international relations, we're not talking about the kinds of things that international relations scholarship, or even international legal scholarship, is talking about. They're talking about states, the relationship between the state and non-state actors, the relationship between states and international institutions like the UN, the ways in which states regulate behaviors between each other. In reality, the cosmopolitan approach takes a much different view. They see human beings as the fundamental units of moral concern, and so therefore their rights and interests are a matter of global concern, not just within the basic national borders of in between each of these states. The idea is that principles of justice, principles of economic justice, distributive justice, environmental justice, will apply across states, not only applying within them. Cosmopolitan position themselves in a standing diametrically opposite to that of the statist. They argue for the fact that a plan to end severe poverty could be carried out, and this fact is a matter of justice, as global unfair inequalities are replicated by the global order, which ought for this to be retained unjust. What this is giving us here is not only the basic obligations, but also a philosophical underpinning for these obligations, and we can see this in other writings as well. Fundamentally, what this is suggesting here is that the way in which international relations and international law operates is fundamentally perpetuating and is continuing the perpetual cycle of inequality and of injustice. Sometimes this can be critiqued from a particularly colonialist perspective, thinking about neo-colonialism, thinking about neo-imperialism, thinking about the injustices of past imperialisms, and how this has fundamentally shifted and shaped the way the international legal system operates. Writings of people like, for example, Anthony Angie are very, very illuminative in that particular regard. The cosmopolitan vision then sometimes goes as far as advocating that global institutions, or even the establishment of a world government, could exist to ensure the existence of, or the link this lecture on global justice to a previous lecture that we did on global constitutionalism. In that regard, and in that lecture, we spent time talking firstly about whether or not the international legal system is increasingly looking constitutional, looking like it has constitutional features, but we also asked the normative question. We also asked to what extent should international law, to what extent should international relations increasingly be understood as a global constitutional framework, and we should basically play into these ideas of global constitutionalism. To what extent should necessarily a world government exist? This is the more extreme end of global constitutionalism. Of course, global constitutionalism doesn't necessarily advocate for the existence of a world government, but at the most extreme end that is what it would necessarily entail. So in the political theory of global justice then, Luis Cambrera makes a very good point. They say that not only do we have strong obligations to peoples elsewhere, but that accountable integration among nation states will help ensure that all peoples can lead a decent life. This seemingly is presenting not only a position of global justice that gives us a normative framing, the idea that we do have obligations, we ought to act in a way that provides for justice for those who don't live in the same country as us, but also that the integration among nation states is what we need to ensure that we actually fulfill our obligations as people to other peoples elsewhere. Going back real quick to the Stanford Encyclopedia then, contemporary cosmopolitans typically hold that every human being has standing as an ultimate unit of moral concern and is entitled to equal consideration of her interests no matter what other affiliations, especially national affiliations, she might have. The cosmopolitan view is very, very nice, if you will. It's a very, very nice view. It's this idea that we should be able to cut through the basic frameworks of the nation state. Maybe us as international lawyers and people who are international relations scholars, maybe we all get a little bit too caught up in the rules and the regulations and the obligations and the relationships between states. We think about states quite a lot, we think about international law as primarily concerning states, as well as international relations as primarily concerning states. Maybe there is an argument to be had that we should cut through that sometimes and that we should just typically hold a very basic standard philosophical ethical position. The standard ethical position that every human being has standing as an ultimate unit of moral concern and is entitled to equal consideration of her interests no matter what other affiliations she might have, namely especially national affiliations. The contrast then is the statist approach, or sometimes known as the state-centric approach, or maybe in some other regards the nationalist approach if you want to be a bit more theoretical about it. The statist or the state-centric approach argues that justice obligations are primarily in some cases in the sort of weaker view or exclusively in the stronger view within states among citizens rather than between states or globally, okay, among citizens within the nation state itself. Now like I've said there are sort of, just like with cosmopolitanism, just like with global constitutionalism, there are basically extreme views and the more liberal views on these different kinds of approaches. The more liberal view is that for the most part we might consider global justice and the idea of obligations between different peoples across the world, but for the most part our obligations are primarily within the nation state. And then the more extreme statist position, the more radical statist position, is that no no no there is exclusively only justice obligations that exist within the nation state. The nation state framework defines the justice obligations, defines the contours, defines the borders literally of what is and what isn't an obligation of justice between peoples. In other words, states owe primary duties to their own citizens and that's it. Obligations to non-citizens in the more liberal approach might be weaker in the sense that there might be the obligations for humanitarian assistance, humanitarian aid, for example, across borders, or in the more extreme view that there is no obligations whatsoever. If there is suffering going on elsewhere it might be nice for states to involve themselves with humanitarian assistance, with charity work etc etc, but there is no obligation to do so. There is no obligation for a country in one part of the world to help out the people of a different country in a different part of the world. And so these are the sort of two basic frameworks fundamentally here then. Cosmopolitans, the current debate between cosmopolitans and the defendants of the so-called political conceptions of justice, focus mainly on two questions. First, what is the site and scope of justice? And second, whether problems such as drastic worldwide economic inequalities and mass differences in life chances between members of wealthy and poor countries can be tackled only by transcending the traditional nation-state border. And it is the cosmopolitan and the status position that represents the two dominant theoretical standpoints when we think about global justice, when we think about the debate on global distributive justice. The statists take a very state approach, as you can probably imagine. They take the view that the primary unit of moral concern, of equal moral concern, is that of the state. And of course the cosmopolitan takes the view that the person, the individual, is a better presentation on this. One of the statists' arguments is that, essentially, since states are the primary units of political association and enforcement, only those associations do robust principles of justice apply. Only to those do the principles of justice apply. The global order lacks the kinds of coercive institutions and shared political community that justify strong distributive justice claims. So this is one of the points that we think about. Well, where does distributive justice obligations come from? Where do they come from? One of the answers to this question might be the interconnectedness of cultural institutions and the coercive institutions and shared political communities of the state. It does seem to make sense, in the literature at the very least, that domestic justice is a much more robust series of philosophical arguments and debates than that of global justice. If you read, for example, the writings of individuals like John Rawls and Robert Nozick and people like Michael Sandel, they will come to the conclusion that, and in the sort of 70s and 80s and 90s, when these kinds of debates were being had as the result primarily of people like John Rawls, for example, that domestic justice is first and foremost the primary concern of the political philosopher. Whereas people like Thomas Pogge, for example, and others who are thinking more globally, they seek to take those kinds of justice frameworks and to think about them from a global justice perspective. John Rawls himself wrote an entire work on the application of his view of justice as fairness from the state perspective, the interstate perspective, on his writings on the law of peoples, which is often criticized for not going far enough in some regards or going too far in others. Justice differs from other types of values in that it sets out rightfully enforceable entitlements. Once it is appreciated, however, cosmopolitanism and statism can be shown to offer inadequate accounts of global justice. This person is arguing against, Valenti is arguing against, this basic principle of taking one side or the other. Taking the enforceability of justice seriously leads us to advocate global outcome sufficiency and global procedural equality, thereby steering the middle course between statism and cosmopolitanism. This whole book is a very useful view on the critiques of cosmopolitanism and non-cosmopolitanism. So fundamentally then, the argument about these two positions revolves around whether or not justice applies globally or whether it is limited to political communities. And so the question of enforceability, the question of this particular idea concerning enforceability and legitimacy is another dimension of how justice obligations can be legitimately discussed. One of the critiques when we think about the idea of global justice is this idea of the enforceability of these kinds of debates. For example, cited here, the comprehensive ideal of global justice is not yet theoretically justifiable. Nonetheless, it does not deserve the scepticism many statists express towards it. To create a kind of continuity between global justice, cosmopolis, the interstate justice, leviathan, a third liberal position is proposed, a third liberal option is proposed. And so fundamentally then, when we think about this, some theorists propose this middle ground, as cited here by Maffetone and also Valente, that neither of these positions are particularly adequate. And the paper here on rightful enforceability presents a very important view that enforceability has to be a framework from which global justice can be discussed. And also, of course, between the leviathan and the cosmopolis, Maffetone is making a very important point as well, that a liberal view proposes that essentially that the right cannot consist in a mere realization of the good. That is the position that Maffetone makes the point of, suggesting that a duty of justice based on urgency rather than full global egalitarianism might be a more apt strategy. Within this then, the critiques of cosmopolitanism is often very easy to think about. We can clearly see that cosmopolitanism is critiqued for being too demanding, often requiring massive redistribution, being too idealistic given the real political constraints, for being too utopian in its outlook. Fundamentally, we can see that the practical position, the practical implications of the cosmopolitan ideals is often too idealistic to guide real world circumstances. By contrast then, if we were to add an extra slide in here that I forgot to add in, the statist approach is also critiqued for being insufficiently responsive to global realities. And so fundamentally, if you were to ask my opinion of where I would sit on this particular spectrum of the cosmopolitan versus the statist, I'd probably go more towards the cosmopolitan approach, because the statist view just fundamentally fails to deal with the realities of problems that are deeply interconnected, that exist in a deeply interconnected world. If you took a very very strong statist position, for example, the view that obligations of the state only apply to and within the borders of the national community, you cannot solve the climate crisis. The climate crisis has to be something that is dealt with, and through the use of international cooperation. Now, whether or not that demands a cosmopolitan approach or a middle ground approach, an approach that could be viewed from the perspective of people like Valenti or Maffetone is a debate for another day, but fundamentally it cannot be dealt with by a statist approach. But the critiques of cosmopolitanism can argue that it's too idealistic and too demanding, and its utopian outlook presents a worldview that is just as useless as that as the statist approach. It cannot be dealt with either, because it is too idealistic given the real political constraints that exist. So what we have done now is spent an entire half an hour talking about global justice literature, talking about basic principles of global justice. Now, as with international relations theories from the last lecture, the subject of global justice is an entire lecture series on its own, and maybe one day I will do a lecture series on global justice. This is very much a deep interest of mine, but what I want to do now is shift towards thinking about the relationship between global justice and international law, and provide some case studies that illustrate this point in a useful way. So, how does international law and global justice align? In short, public international law is one of the principal legal frameworks through which claims of global justice are mediated, are realized, and are contested. Many problems that are raised by global justice, problems concerning poverty, redistributive justice, human rights, the environment, global inequality, are addressed within a framework of public international law. That is something that is just a fact of life, a factual reality. There's no getting behind, getting away from the fact that when we think about global justice, when we go back to that Stanford Encyclopedia article where we talked about the kinds of things that a global justice theory should have involved and should do, essentially, one of the things that we noted is that it should identify the problem, it should identify solutions to the problem, it should identify the actors responsible or people who should do something about it, and it identifies why. Within that, the solutions to the problem almost inevitably will require either an engagement in international relations or, more accurately, an engagement in international law. If you want to know more about the relationship between the two, go back to the previous lecture where we discussed some of the relationships between the two. So, fundamentally, the existence of global justice compels the international community to address issues which are not necessarily state-centric, and so one of the ways in which the international community addresses issues in generality which are not necessarily state-centric is to go through the process of international law. This requires us to understand international law. And so, fundamentally, the philosophical debates on global justice influences how international law is interpreted and developed. It is argued that the debate on global justice is really of much relevance after decades in which debates were dominated by the state-centric paradigm. Current debates in political philosophy also addresses issues of global inequality, global poverty, and moral foundations of international law. As recent events have demonstrated, these issues also play an important role in the practice of international law. So, we're not just talking as international legal scholars, as people who sit in universities and write about the philosophy of international law, we're talking about people who are actually involved in the practice of international law, the making of international law. This is not just about the moral foundations of international law, interesting though that may be, we're talking now also about the role that global justice plays in the practice of international law. It shows that the normative ideal of global justice influences not only how we can justify the existence of international law, but now also how we can think about the content, the interpretation, and the legitimacy of public international law. This expanding of the scope of international law through international law beyond the states to individuals is of course very similar to the ideas of global justice. Because global justice focuses on individuals rather than just states, international law has gradually evolved to encompass individual rights. This is another way in which global justice has begun to inform the development of international law. Now, there are a variety of different ways in which this has been viewed and has been seen. So, from a broad perspective, traditionally, and as we've looked at when we looked at the history of international law, the subject of public international law is that of the relationship between states, and states do still remain the primary focus of international legal relations. However, recent years, more recent developments have seen the encompassing of individuals into this system. Human rights law is now concerned with the individual, with individual human rights. International criminal law, one of the most important principles that was established at Nuremberg, for example, is this principle of individual criminal responsibility. No longer can individuals claim protection from the state when it comes to the international crimes that they themselves commit, the crimes of genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression. It can no longer be the case, since the end of the Second World War, that an individual who commits a war crime, an individual who commits crimes against humanity, can claim that they are acting under the auspices of the state, and that therefore they can give rise to state responsibility for these crimes. But me, as an individual, I am not responsible, and I shouldn't have any kind of punishment or response beyond that of the response that comes from the domestic framework of the state. Nuremberg challenges that idea. Nuremberg sees many members of the Wehrmacht, and members of the SS, and members of Einsatzgruppen commandos, be put on trial for their crimes. Similarly, in Tokyo. Similarly, in the Yugoslav Tribunal, and the Rwanda Tribunal, and now in the International Criminal Court. There are also issues that are transnational in nature, so climate change and global inequality. But you could also make the point, and include this in this conversation about individuals, that in recent years we have seen an increase in the relationship between the state and non-state groups. And you don't have to look much further than international humanitarian law, and look at the ways in which we can theoretically understand the regulation of the laws of IHL as applying to non-state armed groups. Groups that are not part of any formal commitment to a state, but maybe are engaged in a non-state armed conflict, a non-international armed conflict. And there are different ways in which we can underpin that basic principle. One of these ideas, and one of these NGOs that works to try and increase the compliance with international humanitarian law for non-state armed groups, is something known as Geneva Corp, which is a group that works to try and increase the compliance of non-state armed groups, and in some cases terrorist organizations, with IHL. Again, signifying the relationship between international law and, increasingly, individuals or non-state groups, rather than between international law and states. Something that is clearly bringing the issue of global justice into the fold. With all this being said though, what are the challenges that we can think of? Well, the major challenge, of course, is despite the fact that I've been waxing lyrical for the past few minutes about international human rights law protecting individuals, despite the individual criminal responsibility at Nuremberg, and the Geneva Corp, and things concerning non-state armed groups, the major challenge is that public international law traditionally is about relations among sovereign states, whereas global justice pushes for fairness among individuals globally. This is fundamentally just a mismatch. The legal framework is designed for and it's designed for states, and maybe in some cases institutions, but the normative ideal of global justice is individual-centered. How do we square this circle? How do we bridge this gap together to produce a system of international law that would work in a more effective manner? So, this is the problem, the state-centric versus the individual-centric. You've also got the problem that we looked at in the previous lecture on international relations, which is realpolitik, power asymmetries, legitimacy issues, and the critics often argue that international legal arrangements reflect and perpetuate inequalities, and so some make the point that fundamentally international law should not be the framework through which we discover and discuss the obligations and we actuate the obligations of global justice, because it is international law that fundamentally causes and perpetuates these inequalities, the power asymmetries between the global north and the global south, the legacy of colonialism between these two institutions as well, and so we can see that essentially international law, if we are a group of people who want to achieve global justice, want to achieve these global goals, and one of the people say, well, why don't we use international law as a method? You could make the legitimate argument, as people have in the past, that because of the legacy of colonialism, because of the legacy of inequalities, because of the power of states and realpolitik and the international relations of states and potentially realist positions on international relations, you could argue that international law actually just perpetuates these problems, it cannot be used to solve these problems. Is world justice possible without a world state? In recent years, reflection on existential threats like climate change, war, and pandemics, and how perspectives of the oppressed might inform the future of the sub-discipline have contributed to new dimensions in answering core questions, along with adding central questions within this field. Fundamentally then, is it really the case that we can't solve the issue of global justice, or we can't solve questions that are fundamentally a matter of global justice, without the existence of a world government, without the existence of a world state to essentially deal with this? At which point, to what extent does global justice simply reduce down to statism in some kind of way? If we need a world state, if we need a state that exists in a sort of global government structure, then to what extent is global justice, or do accounts of global justice, just collapse into status accounts, but they're just a state that is global, if that makes sense, a global state account. So now that we've thought about this interconnection, and we've thought about some of the critiques, let's do some case studies. There are three case studies I want to specifically outline and cite for you, two of them concerns climate change, one of them concerns economic law, and the first of these is the UGENDER Foundation case, which provides us with a link between global justice and public international law. So this is actually a real case, this is a climate litigation case. The facts in this case are not that important, but we will go through them anyway, because they're a little bit important. Okay, so in 2013 a Dutch non-governmental organization called UGENDER Foundation, or UGENDER Foundation, brought a case on behalf of 886 Dutch citizens against the state of the Netherlands, the Dutch state, arguing that the state's plans to reduce greenhouse gas emissions were inadequate, and that their plans, because they were so inadequate in terms of their sort of their CO2 emissions targets, that they actually violated the legal duties under the human rights law, and also the law of torts. We won't think about the law of torts, we're going to talk about international human rights law. Of course the Netherlands is a party to the Council of Europe, and by extension they necessarily are a part of the European Convention on Human Rights, and on the 24th of June 2015, the district court of the Hague ruled that the Netherlands had a duty of care to its citizens, and ordered a much greater reduction of CO2 emissions of at least 25 percent, compared to 1990 levels by 2020. This ruling was then upheld in 2018, and then reaffirmed in 2019 by the Dutch Supreme Court, which confirmed that the state itself must aim for at least a reduction target of that 25 percent, and that domestic courts do have the power to require government action on climate change, and they argue that this power to require government action on climate change is grounded in human rights obligations, specifically referring to articles two and eight of the European Convention on Human Rights. Article two of course, the right to life, very very very important. What does this illustrate then? What does this give us? It gives us a connection here between global justice and public international law, specifically the law of the European Convention on Human Rights. The case connects the idea that people across states should be protected from the existential threats of climate change with public international law. Here the human rights framework that is established by the European Convention on Human Rights, and the international legal framework of the ECHR, is being used here to impose obligations on a state for global scale harms. It shows then that a domestic court enforced an obligation that arises in part from international law, but responds to a global problem like climate change, a global problem which of course crosses national boundaries. It also gives us a bit of a distributive justice dimension. The reduction target was justified partially by the fact that the Netherlands is a developed company, developed country, with responsibility to reduce climate change and contribute to global efforts. So it provides a normative framework, a normative obligations framework, in the sense that like I said just then, the Netherlands is a developed country, it's a global north country, and so they have an obligation in law to essentially respond to the growing crisis of climate change and to contribute to global efforts to combat climate change, being obviously a distributive justice dimension. Now this is a very useful case and this is a case that will then be replicated in a similar kind of manner when we look at the ICJ in a second, but for now I just want to very quickly write a little bit about and read a little bit about the idea of global economic justice as a potential case study. So fundamentally then, the idea of global justice suggests that wealthier states have obligations towards poorer states or to poorer populations, and that this can be viewed and can be accentuated through things like development assistance, by things like fairness in the international economic order. But one of the things that we see here is a clear discrepancy, because I want to use economic justice as a case study, because I want to draw your attention to the link between this lecture here and the series of lectures on international economic law that are, like I said, running alongside this particular subject. And the reason for this is because the relationship the relationship between the global economic order and global justice is not one that is very compelling in terms of its connection, at least in terms of what it's achieved. Climate change litigation and climate change law has come on leaps and bounds ever since the start of this lecture series in the ICJ, for example, but economic law is a little bit different. International law basically provides very few binding mechanisms, compelling redistribution of wealth from richer to poorer states. There is this discrepancy then between the obligations of states in relation to climate change, as we'll note in a second, versus the obligations of states towards redistributive justice from a purely economic perspective. And academics such as Ralph Wilde, for example, in chapters on the frontiers of human rights, makes a very interesting point. This is just the abstract to this particular book chapter, by the way, this isn't the full chapter, but they say that using a case study of an activist initiative concerning the extraterritorial application of the international human rights law based on the Maastricht principles, the paper itself, the chapter itself, considers some of the dilemmas involved in the global economic justice project. This is the thing that is most important for our perspective, because what Ralph Wilde is doing here is highlighting for us a clear hope versus reality tension, the sort of the gap between the ideas of hope and reality, between elitism, orientalism, patriarchy on the one hand, and the representativeness in its various forms on the other, and between statism and global constitutionalism, or sorry, or globalism and cosmopolitanism, to bring it back into the fold that debate about statism versus cosmopolitanism. And the Maastricht principles example, and these sort of extraterritorial obligations of states under human rights law, are influential but non-binding, and that's why that is a useful normative gap that we can see between global justice and the enforceability of these different kinds of legal norms. And so this kind of case type, this kind of example, this kind of case study, highlights how public international law, specifically concerning the economy, trade, investment, etc., etc., can be used in advance of global justice by imposing obligations on states, but also how this legal architecture is very, very weak in terms of its enforcement and redistribution. It underscores that, essentially, when we think about economic justice, as we will in more detail in future lessons time, and specifically when we look at international economic law in its own lecture series, that there's a lot that needs to be done. There's a lot of work that needs to be done in relation to decoupling historical aspects of economic law from its colonial past, and also thinking about the ways in which economic law can be supportive of the distributive justice, even if it is more seemingly supportive of basic neoliberal principles that existed and have existed since the decolonization at the end of the Second World War. The final case study, though, I want to look at is, of course, the ICJ's advisory opinion on climate change. Now, this is not going to be looking at the details of this in any great detail here, and we're coming towards the end of this lecture, and like I said, I'm planning in the future to do a whole lecture series on international environmental law, which, of course, the climate change and the climate justice study will really examine in a lot of detail. I want to just very briefly go over some of the basic things that are established by this particular advisory opinion. In July 2025, the ICJ issued what was a unanimous advisory opinion in the case concerning the obligations of states in respect to climate change. The court held, essentially, that the legal obligations of their international law existed to take measures to prevent climate change and to protect current and future generations, and that in doing, and in failing to do so, sorry, the state may constitute, the actions or the inactions, may constitute an internationally wrongful act. We'll get to state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts in future lectures, but this is a huge step. The ICJ here is linking the crisis of climate change to state responsibility, to the responsibility of states under international law, and so it explicitly recognizes a global justice dimension in the sense that the state's obligations relate not only to their own citizens, but to a global environment, to future generations and states that are vulnerable to climate change, global south states, poorer countries. It reinforces the legal architecture of public international law as a tool for addressing the issue of globally distributed harms and obligations. So, essentially, this is the terrain of global justice, the idea of transnational or shared burdens and fairness across borders, and it potentially shifts the horizon of state obligations under international law from purely bilateral relations to a more broader global justice responsibility. Of course, there are limitations to the ICJ's opinion. Of course, it provides for the fact that, of course, for the most part, advisory opinions don't provide obligations directly to states, because states aren't necessarily involved. These are questions that are asked by, generally, the UN General Assembly and that the ICJ provides an opinion on. But nevertheless, this represents a very, very strong position of international law by the ICJ, many of which are principles of a customary nature. Although the opinion adds pervasive authority and clarifies obligations, it obviously does not itself create mandatory enforceable obligations that would have to come afterwards. So there is still the caveat that needs to be noted there as well. Fundamentally, of course, this represents and reflects the relationship between the ICJ's advisory opinions and the contentious jurisdiction of the ICJ as well. But fundamentally, when we think about the ICJ's climate change opinion, it is a groundbreaking obligation. It is a groundbreaking view and position of international law and provides us with potentially a framework and potentially a mechanism through which the international legal community might be able to provide obligations against the or in favor of the prevention of or the combating of climate change. Now, as I noted at the start of this lecture, the next lecture is going to concern the issue of fragmentation of international law before we start thinking about the sources of international law in more detail and then move on to the more substantive details concerning statehood, state succession, the relationship between international and domestic law, jurisdiction, immunity, state responsibility and dispute resolution.