International Law

In November 2025, the Government of Libya launched legal action to recover more than US$100 million in unpaid debt from Zimbabwe, adding to the nation’s growing list of creditor disputes as it struggles under a debt burden exceeding US$23 billion. As of September 2025, Zimbabwe's total public and publicly guaranteed debt stock stood at US$23.4 billion, which includes US$13.6 billion in external debt. This update examines Zimbabwe’s renewed sovereign debt challenges through the lens of the ongoing legal dispute with Libya over a US$100 million fuel-related debt originating from a 2001 credit facility, situating the case within Zimbabwe’s broader, long-standing debt crisis and governance weaknesses in public borrowing. The update further explores how the decision by the Libyan Foreign Bank to pursue litigation in the UK High Court reflects wider trends in cross-border sovereign debt enforcement and signals increasing impatience among creditors with unresolved legacy obligations. By connecting the Libyan claim to Zimbabwe’s wider external debt overhang, exclusion from international capital markets, and stalled arrears clearance efforts, the analysis highlights how long-standing sovereign debts continue to constrain fiscal sovereignty, undermine economic recovery, and expose structural weaknesses in debt management.

The conference seeks to provide a rigorous, practice-oriented forum for interrogating foundational questions in reparation in international law. How have international courts and tribunals conceptualized the forms, functions, and limits of reparation? What distinctive insights and claims emerge from African experiences with historical and contemporary injustice, including colonialism, slavery, apartheid, and serious human rights violations? And how might African perspectives continue to shape the progressive development of international law in this area?

“Digital Solidarity and International Law: Collective Action and Human Rights in the Digital Age” is an edited volume to be published under a contract with Routledge in the Routledge Research in International Law series. It will examine how solidarities are formed and expressed in the digital sphere and their implications for international law in areas including human rights, trade, environment, health, and peace and security. The volume is edited by Dr Yohannes Eneyew Ayalew (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem), Dr Karin M Frodé (Monash University), and Dr Christopher Nyinevi (ECOWAS Court of Justice).

This blog post describes anecdotal and individual experiences. In future research I shall try to situate the experiences described below in the raging debate on whether or not academic institutions need to express solidarity - and act on it through boycotts, sanctions, etc. - in response to atrocities being committed anywhere in the world, a debate which is taking place on university campuses all over the world. This phenomenon deserves wider study, not only by international lawyers but also from various (multi)disciplinary perspectives. This blog post relates to ways in which academic institutions talk about and respond to alleged breaches of international law rather than double standards in international law as such.

International criminal justice is, by common consent, to at least some degree, victors’ justice. Some have argued, however, that victors’ justice might be giving way, over time, to a more universal justice also capable of holding victors accountable. This hopeful notion is often held up by others as a specifically liberal delusion. In my current project, however, I hope to use the examples of leftist “civil society tribunals” from the late Cold War to show that this idea - delusional or not - was once actually more popular amongst radical critics of the liberal international legal mainstream. Liberals, in this period, could thus be the “realists.” I conclude that geo-political realities do not only produce victors’ justice, they explain ideological responses towards it. They have changed how double standards are perceived.

While each post focuses on distinct contexts and frameworks, several overarching themes emerge. First, the posts reveal divergent conceptualizations and applications of the concepts of double standards in international legal practice, which in turn raises further questions about how best to examine the role of double standards in fields as disparate as international economic and criminal law. Second, the posts underscore the tension between the ideals of universality and the realities of power in international law: whether in the Human Rights Council, international criminal tribunals, or through state practice, double standards reveal the gap between abstract normative aspirations and political constraints that undermine consistent and principled action in specific cases. Third, the posts begin to identify the rhetorical and practical tools used to navigate or exploit this tension. From Esponda’s exploration of argumentative strategies to Schüller’s critique of procedural openings, the posts show how states and institutions justify selective actions while striving to maintain legitimacy. Fourth, some posts broach the question to what extent double standards are a remediable aspect of practice or, alternatively, an unavoidable feature of the international legal system.

The 10th Biennial Conference of the Asian Society of International Law (AsianSIL) is scheduled to take place in Ha Noi, Viet Nam, in 9-10 October 2025. Hosted by the Diplomatic Academy of Viet Nam, this event aims to provide a platform for intellectual exchange among scholars, practitioners, students, and individuals interested in international law.

International law applies to the interchanging relationships and rules between states, including the establishment of norms and standards which govern their activities. This changing landscape of international law is recognised in one of the introductory paragraphs of this book: ‘international law possess an inherent transformative power to renew and remake itself if we are committed to reimagining the discipline and its fundamental characteristics, including the concept of sustainable development’ (pg 2). Sustainable development (SD) has been an integral part of international law discourse before the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). Hence, this book focuses on the ahistoricism and influence of international law on the environment and sustainable development in African legal systems through a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens.

A webinar presented by the IBA Poverty and Social Development Committee, supported by the IBA Academic and Professional Development, the IBA Access to Legal Aid Committee and the Human Rights Research and Education Center, University of Ottawa, Canada.