China’s Belt and Road Initiative is now the world’s largest infrastructure initiative, with long-term climate change effects, and the Green Investment Principles for Belt and Road (GIPs) have been promoted as a key instrument to green the Belt and Road. This article focuses on the question: What role do the GIPs play in building a green Belt and Road and addressing relevant regulatory challenges? Based on the theory of nodal governance, it is argued that the GIPs’ two-layered networks facilitate China to influence investment decisions over many countries along the Belt and Road indirectly through fund providers as key nodes to transition toward green investment. China also avoided direct interference with the domestic policies of host countries through the GIP network. As a framework agreement, the GIPs also provide opportunities for signatories to contribute to the design and negotiation of specific implementation standards, enhanced capacity building, and the prospect of more stringent and prescriptive environmental standards in the future.

Under the Albanese Government’s climate policy, the Safeguard Mechanism is intended to be the primary mechanism for reducing Australia’s emissions and achieving its climate change mitigation targets (43% reduction by 2030 and net zero by 2050). To do this, the Government is making changes to the Safeguard Mechanism to convert it from a regulatory instrument that was originally designed to constrain emission increases into an emissions trading scheme that drives down emissions. Under the enhanced Safeguard Mechanisms, covered facilities will be subject to emission caps based on the emissions-intensity of their operations that will decline over time. These facilities will be able to meet their emission caps (called baselines) by cutting onsite emissions or buying and surrendering either ‘Safeguard Mechanism Credits’ (a form of emission permit issued to covered facilities if their emissions are below their caps) or Australian carbon credit units (ACCUs).

Australia and the United Kingdom (UK) have each witnessed a ‘punitive turn’ in relation to youth justice responses. A lack of contextualisation, such as the impact of trauma and adverse childhood experiences on young people, is often overlooked by media outlets, governments and policymakers, in favour of individual pathologisation of young people. In direct contrast to these punitive responses, the public health approach (PHA) has emerged particularly in the UK; and it identifies experiences of trauma as one of the leading causes of violence within communities. Drawing on the perspectives of those working with children and young people, we critically explore whether the implementation of a PHA could be an effective approach to addressing the underlying causes of young people's involvement in violence. The paper focuses specifically on a case study of the youth justice system in Victoria, Australia and draws on domestic and global perspectives of key stakeholders, to consider whether the introduction of a PHA in Victoria, Australia, would position young people's diverse needs at the centre of policy change in youth justice and better outcomes for young people and communities.

This article submits that the Philippines’ withdrawal from the ICC is invalid under municipal law and ineffective under international law. Notwithstanding the silence of the Philippine Constitution, the principles embodied under it do not allow for a unilateral executive withdrawal from the Statute. Nothing under the president’s plenary executive or foreign affairs power allows him to perform such an act. Moreover, the doctrines of transformation, separation of powers, and the principle of checks and balances require a concurrent legislative act in denouncing a treaty. The withdrawal being invalid under municipal law, it arguably produces no effect under international law. While the regime governing the law of treaties is silent as to the effect of domestic law concerning the competence of a state organ to withdraw, there exists ample authority to suggest that fundamental violations under the latter invalidate the competence to denounce treaties under the former.

There is a broad political consensus that states must not facilitate money laundering, especially as relates to the proceeds of foreign grand corruption. Over the past 30 years, an elaborate regulatory regime has been put in place in most countries to ensure that proceeds of crime are interdicted and confiscated. It rests on the technically non-binding recommendations of the Financial Action Task Force, an influential intergovernmental grouping. Despite this progress and the adoption of international treaties against corruption and organized crime, international law contains no express treaty rule that enjoins states from facilitating money laundering. Furthermore, there are formidable legal and practical obstacles to invoking international legal responsibility of states that do choose to benefit from enabling money laundering. This article explores the disconnect between international law as it stands and the widely accepted political imperative that states must not facilitate money laundering. It argues in favour of recognizing a self-standing customary rule to that effect, and outlines the content and likely impact of such a rule.

A growing number of incidents—particularly since 2009—highlight the South China Sea (SCS) as the preeminent venue for the People's Republic of China (PRC) maritime gray zone operations. “Gray zone operations” are, in essence, operations that are designed to exploit or create legal (and other) uncertainties for a military or strategic advantage. A prominent example is the way that China has used the so-called nine(ten)-dash line without fully explaining the legal basis for it. There are other examples, as well. China has deliberately cultivated uncertainty about the sovereign status of maritime militia vessels—and thus about whether and how the conduct of these vessels might be directly attributable to the PRC. It has harassed U.S. survey vessels seventy-five nautical miles (nm) south of Hainan Island in an effort to disrupt military survey operations that it claims are impermissible and has sunk a Philippine fishing vessel at Reed Bank in an effort to enforce Chinese claims to exclusive fisheries rights in this area. It has also asserted claims and enforcement rights in zones that clearly belong to other states—including actions against Indonesian fishing vessels in seas in the vicinity of the Natuna Islands, which are part of the Indonesian Exclusive Economic Zone (EEZ) (and Continental Shelf). And it has conducted operations on the basis of inapplicable maritime zone rights, such as by asserting a territorial sea and thus the right to control innocent passage around low-tide elevations with artificial installations built upon them—such as with Mischief Reef. The list goes on.

Economic sanctions have been the West's response of choice to Russia's full-scale aggression in Ukraine. Predictably, speculation abounds as to what these sanctions portend for future responses to acts of interstate aggression. The principles underpinning the “trading with the enemy” laws of a seemingly bygone era have resurfaced but applied not to the sanctioning powers’ own enemies but in solidarity with another state, at least insofar as the breaches of erga omnes obligations through armed aggression are concerned. The contemporary expansion in sanctions practice may have far-reaching repercussions.

This article extends discussion of the recently introduced licence theory of legal personality to the two remaining categories of legal personality available under Australian law, namely, Natural Legal Personality and Bodies Politic. The licence theory conceives of legal personality as designated legal functions, grouped together for nominated purposes. More particularly, it conceives of legal personality as a licensing system, whereby legal personality is granted by the State subject to various nominated conditions. These conditions reflect the overarching purpose behind the grant of legal personality, and may be organised into three general categories: Capability Conditions; Public Interest Conditions; and Use Conditions. According to the licence theory, in forming an understanding of legal personality it is necessary to consider the following design factors: i) the means by which a particular legal person is activated; ii) the purpose underwriting the grant of legal personality by the State; iii) legal capacities and obligations; and iv) the various different conditions operative in relation to the grant of a particular class of legal personality. In this article, these four factors are applied and considered in relation to both Natural Legal Personality and the Commonwealth of Australia (being the pre-eminent manifestation of the Body Politic).

The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties in Investor-State Disputes: History, Evolution and Future is the first consolidated analysis of how the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (VCLT) has informed the interpretation, application and development of international investment law and the resolution of investor-State disputes. Over the past several decades, the VCLT – the ‘treaty on treaties’ – has achieved a rich and nuanced track record of influence in international investment law, including in the context of investment treaty arbitration. This book demonstrates how approaches to key issues of treaty law in investment treaty arbitration diverge or converge from the VCLT and approaches of other international courts, as well as the lessons that investment treaty arbitration could derive from – or even offer for – the interpretation and application of the VCLT rules in other settings.