Developing Countries

The most glaring gap in global economic governance is the lack of an orderly and fair sovereign debt restructuring arrangement.  Annamaria Viterbo’s new volume, Sovereign Debt Restructuring: the Role and Limits of Public International Law, helps us understand why this is so and how we might move forward. 

There is no doubt that solving this pandemic is the most pressing challenge of our time. This is not a zero sum game. Below, I elaborate on the four points for effective global solidarity to tackle the pandemic.

While WIPO’s technical assistance programme has been seen as less biased than much of the bilateral assistance on offer from the EU and the US, the history that Africa has with WIPO concerning cooperation in the provision of IP technical assistance can be said to have led to the introduction of Western-style IP norms across the continent. Our leaders and negotiators, therefore, need to proceed with caution in negotiating the AfCFTA IP protocol and the kind of technical assistance they receive. They must consult broadly and court the services of African scholars and experts on the matter.

There are two basic problems that may resonate with those who are engaged in teaching and researching international law in developing countries: first, motivating students, and second, seamlessly accessing the requisite resources for teaching and research. This essay presents and outlines challenges and proposes some solutions to address them. This is not to say that these are the only constraints they face, rather this choice is driven by the length of this essay.

This blog post focuses on the Agreement for the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the implications for the evolution of lex mercatoria in Africa. This blog post is primarily based on a recent paper by Chisa Onyejekwe and Eghosa Ekhator titled ‘AfCFTA and Lex Mercatoria: Reconceptualizing International Trade Law in Africa’. The paper argues that some of the major innovations embedded in the AfCFTA (such as variable geometry and dispute settlement amongst others) form the crux of an emerging African practice of lex mercatoria. Consequently, the creation of AfCFTA has engendered what can be termed as an emerging concept of ‘Lex Mercatoria Africana’. In the context of the AfCFTA, this is exemplified by the notion that the AfCFTA explicitly promotes African trade principles.

Through our analysis of the course outlines of the above subjects, we have arrived at the conclusion that the LL.M program at SAU has the potential to make a significant contribution to the development of South Asian perspective of IL. All the compulsory courses taught at SAU address issues of international law relevant to South Asia, scholarly works focussing on South-Asian issues have been given due consideration, as have the works of South Asian and TWAIL scholars.

he curriculum of law schools was standardized and based on the framework curriculum introduced by the Ministry of Education. Under the framework curriculum, law subjects are divided into compulsory and elective. The compulsory subjects are targeted at the basic laws, which are an unavoidable component of the legal education in Vietnam. Under the framework curriculum, both public international law and private international law are compulsory subjects. For this reason, law schools are obliged to make these courses available to their students, and students have to take and pass the subjects as a pre-requisite for the successful completion of their legal education.

As an essential outcome of strengthening the state control over natural wealth and resources, Tanzania has brought natural resource contracts into the purview of its domestic legal system. In doing so, some countries have exercised their sovereign rights to natural resources as the basis for denouncing international adjudication of investment claims based on such contracts. Indeed, biases perceived by Tanzania concerning international arbitration fora have played a great role in bringing natural recourse contracts into the purview of Tanzanian legal system. The goal of the reforms is to mitigate such partialities through using domestic dispute resolution mechanisms.

In the opinion of this contribution, African States must be more radical in their approach to investment treaty and ISDS reforms. First, they must retain the role of domestic courts in the resolution of investment disputes in line with their national constitutions. Second, where the case for an international dispute settlement mechanism is made, they must consider a state-state trade and investment dispute settlement bodies at the regional and continental levels for all transnational business disputes. Appeals from domestic courts could lie before regional appellate bodies and from a regional appellate to a continental dispute settlement body. This should provide assurance to investors and other business entities that their disputes can and must be resolved within the African continent.

COVID-19 generated a new buzz around our work and renewed interest in the study of vulnerability. Since then, we have reappraised our initial piece, with the intention of moving beyond its conceptual foundations toward a more practical and concrete application of the work. We realized however, that for many, there is curiosity around the TVI project, and ultimately what we are trying to achieve through it. In this reflective piece, we present briefly the TVI in a nutshell – its aims, methodology and conceptual premises – and then provide  initial thoughts on the way forward under our TVI project.