Chair Fassbender

International Moot Court in International Criminal Law 2023 

For the first time in four years, the International Criminal Court Moot Court was once again physically taking place in The Hague. The team of the University of St.Gallen, consisting of Ritwik Dwivedi, Dalia Hofstettler, Dzianis Kryvashei, Livia Lüdin und Dominik Wawer, had intensively studied issues of international criminal law and procedure over the last two semesters. Supervised by Prof. Bardo Fassbender and his assistant Martin Bader, the students dealt, in particular, with the criminal prosecution of the crime of ecocide, the legitimacy of UN investigative bodies and the jurisdiction of the ICC in the case of a secession. Out of more than eighty participating teams, the Universidade Federal da Bahia (Brazil) finally succeeded. For more information, please see the 2023 experience report. The Chair of International and European Law (Prof. Fassbender) will again participate in the competition with a student team next year. Interested students can already apply for participation (see the section “Moot Court” on this page).

Public Lecture on the Right of Self-Determination of Peoples 

In the autumn semester of 2022, Prof. Fassbender gave a three-part lecture on "The Right of Peoples to Self-Determination - Empty Promise or Building Block of a Future International Order?" 
Contrary to what its name suggests, "international law" is still today primarily a right that entitles and obligates not peoples but states in their relationship to each other. At its center are still the "sovereign states" and the attempt to balance their interests. It was not until the 20th century that peoples also found a place in this intergovernmental order. During World War I, American President Woodrow Wilson advocated a "right of self-determination" that would give each people the right to freely shape its political and economic circumstances. After the Second World War, the right of self-determination formed a basis for the dissolution of the European colonial empires in Africa, Asia and America. In today's international law, the right of self-determination is generally recognized, but many difficulties stand in the way of its realization in concrete cases. This is particularly evident when a people wants to secede from its previous state. 
The three-part public lecture examined the origin and development of the right of peoples to self-determination from a historical and legal perspective. How does this right relate to the rights of minorities on the one hand and to human rights on the other? What is meant by the right to "autonomy"? Are there legal procedures in which the right to self-determination can be asserted? These questions were illustrated with current examples of conflicts over the right to self-determination in Palestine, Scotland and Catalonia. The demand of indigenous peoples for self-determination was also discussed in the lectures. In summary, answers were sought to the question "Can the right to self-determination be a building block of a future, more pluralistic international order?" The lecture met with lively interest, also among students of the Vocational and Continuing Education Center Wil-Uzwil.

New book on the reform of the United Nations Security Council

Since the early 1990s, a reform of the UN Security Council has been discussed at the headquarters of the United Nations in New York. The reform efforts, which aim to make the Security Council more representative and effective, focus primarily on the composition of the Security Council and its voting rules. The composition of the Council has remained unchanged since 1965, when the number of non-permanent members was increased from six to ten. Even since 1945, when the UN was founded, the category of permanent members, consisting of five states, has remained unchanged. As far as voting rules are concerned, the so-called right of veto is at the center of the reform discussion, with which each permanent member can prevent the adoption of a Security Council resolution. Behind the question of the future composition and functioning of the Security Council ultimately lies the problem of legal world order in the 21st century.

A new book edited by Prof. Bardo Fassbender entitled Key Documents on the Reform of the UN Security Council 1991-2019 now compiles the most important documents and texts from the almost thirty-year reform discussion. Published by the renowned Brill Nijhoff in Leiden and Boston, the volume aims to document the discussion in an unbiased manner by reflecting the positions of UN member states and groups of states, international organizations, and nongovernmental organizations as they have evolved over the years. The volume also takes into account proposals and opinions of individual scholars and think tanks for a reform of the Security Council. A comprehensive introduction provides an overview of the reform discussion and its main points, while appendices provide information on the content of the documents. With this documentation, scholars, diplomats and policymakers now have at their disposal a work that organizes and edits the long-standing and confusing discussion on the future of the Security Council, and thus also provides a basis for further negotiations.

The Limits of Human Rights

Prof. Bardo Fassbender (Chair of International and European Law), together with his colleague Knut Traisbach (University of Barcelona), has published an interdisciplinary book on The Limits of Human Rights with Oxford University Press. The book will be published in December 2019. In the anthology, the editors and twenty-six authors explore the question of what is meant by "limits of human rights" today and which inherent, functional, pragmatic, and ideological limits of human rights can be identified and analyzed in more detail. The book thus aims to make an original contribution to the current scholarly discussion on the meaning of human rights, without fundamentally questioning this meaning or deconstructing the idea of human rights. The volume's distinguished authors, representing law, political science, anthropology, history, philosophy, and sociology, include Hilary Charles-worth (Melbourne Law School), Christine Chinkin (London School of Economics), Andrew Clapham (Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva), Mireille Delmas-Marty (Collège de France, Paris), David Dyzenhaus (University of Toronto), Conor Gearty (London School of Economics), Lynn Hunt (University of California at Los Angeles), Douglas A. Johnson (Harvard Kennedy School), Jan Klabbers (University of Helsinki), Martha C. Nussbaum (University of Chicago), Jeremy Perelman (Sciences Po Paris), Yuval Shany (Hebrew University Jerusalem), Kathryn Sikkink (Harvard Kennedy School), and Henry J. Steiner (Harvard Law School).