Law
The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has inspired an abundant filmography, which traces the main events and addresses many aspects of the conflict. Based on a material composed of about eighty feature films and television series, the chapter studies the way international law with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is represented on screen. Three major themes emerged in this regard, which are analysed successively: the creation of the State of Israel and its consequences on the Palestinian people; the Israeli occupation; the peace process in the Middle East and the ways to achieve it. The chapter concludes with a broader reflection on the place occupied by cinema in the conflict, as a means of struggle, as the object of controversy or as a symbol.
This chapter deals with the way movies approach and depict international law. Both cinema and law belong to an imaginary realm. The methods of law are conceptualization and action. The methods of movies are representations and dreams. It is therefore difficult for the cinema to dramatize international law, with the notable exceptions of criminal trials and war. It is noteworthy that the way a particular movie depicts international law will often depend on the country of production. For instance, American movies frequently resemble propaganda – soft or hard – but, at the same time, American cinema is also able to severely criticize US policies. British movies often convey a kind of imperial nostalgia, even in a parochial way. French ones are willingly self-deprecating, sometimes in a farcical way.
The imagination of new worlds represented in science fiction cinema is a fertile ground for reflecting on the nature of international law. Assumptions of international law can be further tested by stretching their conditions of operation. International law’s argumentative structure makes it quite flexible, maybe more flexible than first appears. Concepts such as State, territory or even humanity seemingly central to the nature of international law can be fundamentally altered or even removed; a recognizable form of international law continues to operate. Still, fidelity to some features of the liberal ethos is needed for international law to continue being relevant. What sci-fi cinema proves is that the ideology of international law is embedded not in States, not even in humanity, but in the equality of rights of groups displaying enough anthropomorphic features. The disappearance of these features marks the end of the explanatory power of the international law analogy. In-between these extremes, science-fiction cinema can further provide relatable materials to make us think radically about international law.
Do films take rights seriously? This chapter argues that answering this question requires first examining underlying assumptions about what films do and the role of popular culture in the construction of socio-legal narratives. It moves on to argue that, rather than advocating the setting aside of humanitarian principles in pursuit of some vitally important ends, many films are best understood as depicting the moral dilemmas raised by the implementation of rights in extreme conditions and reflect some of the profound shifts that have recently occurred in the law and ethics of warfare. The chapter concludes with some thoughts on the danger of 'sanitizing' warfare and the role of films in unsettling the liberal intuition that war can be fought humanely.
This chapter aims at assessing the place of the UN Charter in ‘action movies’, i.e. movies representing the use of armed force in international relations. After spending several hundreds of hours in watching films and series of this kind, a clear conclusion can be drawn: the UN Charter rules are, in most cases, not cited or even evoked as such. The legal debate often appears unnecessary, inappropriate or absurd. To the viewer, it is rather the emergency of the situation and the necessity of action that prevails. In the rare cases where a legal rule is at stake, it is either interpreted broadly to justify military action, or rejected as a formalistic and unrealistic constraint. All in all, action movies generally represent the UN Charter rule on the use of force as inefficient, illegitimate or even ludicrous. Those characteristics can sometimes be explained by certain links between Hollywood and the Pentagon. But, in most cases, the image of a UN Charter with limited scope and effects appears as a cultural representation shared by many directors and filmmakers without any political interference.
This chapter aims to explore how film can bolster or undermine claims about the legality of the use of force. Building on the chapters in this volume by Corten and Dubuisson, it draws out three key themes, namely, genre, interpretation and interdisciplinarity. Next it offers some suggestions for further research on international law and film: first, a broader vision of world cinema; second, analysis of ideology in terms of a military-cinematicographic complex; and using Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) and feminist perspectives to interpret film in ways that engage with broader debates in international law. Finally, it considers legal and visual arguments about the legality of the US military intervention in Afghanistan since 2001 with reference to Siddiq Barmak’s 2003 film Osama.
The objective of this chapter is to analyze the role played by the African human rights system in the regulation, prevention and accountability of multinational corporations’ acts which are damaging for human rights. The African human rights system is understood in this chapter to mean political bodies of the African Union (AU) that set human rights standards, as well as bodies and institutions that provide for their implementation, including the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the African Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights. Does an African normative framework exist regarding the liability of multinational corporations for human rights violations? What could be the main features of the rules and principles entrenched in such a framework? Does this framework strike the proper balance between the pursuit of economic development, through foreign direct investment, and the protection of human rights? This chapter would argue that Africa needs clear guidelines on the protection of human rights in the face of multinational corporations.
This long-awaited volume featuring contributions from top African international lawyers and voices from the continent critically explores the notion of international investment law from an African perspective. It does so by confronting some of the very hard questions with regard to the relationship between international investment and development that have either eluded or not been properly addressed in contemporary scholarships. After many years of popularity, investment treaties have recently caused increasing concern among States, most prominently for the unbalanced nature of their content, the often inadequate safeguard of the regulatory powers of the host State and the shortcomings of international investment arbitration. Some States have upgraded their investment treaties, others have revised their investment treaty model, and others have opted for facilitation agreements. This innovative monograph critically explores all these contentious issues from a multidisciplinary perspective.
The future of the investment regime rests upon a better balancing of the rights and obligations of States and investors. The effectiveness of the investment regime will also depend on enhanced integration between international investment law and other fields of international law, such as human rights law and water law.
This chapter sheds light on the implications of the doctrine of constitutional supremacy on the enforceability of arbitral awards in Ghana in a situation where its constitution regulates the conclusion of international business transactions or international investment agreements (IIAs). After analyzing applicable municipal and international law in relation to the constitutionality of treaties and international economic transactions, the chapter contends that certain conditions have to be fulfilled for an IIA or an international transaction to come into existence in Ghana. Finally, the chapter argues that the doctrine of constitutional supremacy places limitations on the enforcement of constitutionally illegal international business transactions and IIAs in Ghana.