Laws

Released in 2025, a year unprecedented in terms of the call on international and regional bodies for advisory opinions on obligations of states for climate action, the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ) on the Obligations of States in Respect of Climate Change 2025 represents a significant development in international climate law. The Opinion clarifies that States’ climate obligations arise not only from climate treaties such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Paris Agreement, but also from customary international law, human rights law, and general principles of international law, including due diligence, prevention of harm, equity, and intergenerational responsibility. As a result, climate action is increasingly viewed as a matter of legal obligation rather than political discretion. This study examines the extent to which South Africa’s Second Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement (Second NDC) reflects the legal standards articulated by the ICJ. It argues that the Advisory Opinion strengthens the legal significance of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by transforming them from instruments of international cooperation into benchmarks for assessing state compliance with broader climate obligations. The study finds that South Africa possesses a relatively comprehensive legal framework capable of translating international climate obligations into domestic duties. Its Second NDC demonstrates a deliberate effort to implement these obligations through measurable mitigation targets, adaptation measures, loss and damage responses, and a commitment to a just transition. Nevertheless, questions remain regarding whether the level of mitigation ambition reflected in the NDC is sufficient to satisfy the due diligence, human rights, and intergenerational equity standards identified by the ICJ, particularly considering South Africa’s continued dependence on coal and the objective of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C. The study concludes that the ICJ Advisory Opinion has strengthened climate accountability by providing legal benchmarks against which domestic climate action may increasingly be assessed, challenged, and enforced.

European Union asylum law increasingly relies on preliminary procedural mechanisms that may affect whether, where, and through which procedure a protection claim is examined on its merits. This article examines the cumulative significance of responsibility allocation, inadmissibility, border procedures, screening, and third-country mechanisms through doctrinal and conceptual analysis, using developments in UK asylum law as a secondary contrastive point of reference. It uses the concept of jurisdictional filtering to describe the operation of preliminary mechanisms that may redirect, defer, or condition the route to substantive examination and jurisdictional engineering to identify their systemic organization and interaction without assuming a single legislative strategy. Its principal conceptual contribution is the notion of jurisdictional anomaly, which describes the legal position of a person who remains subject to state immigration authority and applicable protection safeguards while preliminary determinations may still affect whether, where, and through which procedure the protection claim will be substantively examined. The article argues that the analytical significance of these mechanisms lies in their cumulative procedural and institutional effects rather than in any suspension of protection obligations. Non-refoulement and other applicable safeguards remain operative, while the route to merits determination may be procedurally differentiated.

This paper examines the implications of the Trump administration’s trade policies for the future of the world trading system and the role Japan should play in response. It argues that, behind the discourse of “national security” and “economic security,” recent U.S. trade policies primarily seek to rebuild and protect domestic industrial capacity and address the distributional consequences of globalization and industrial hollowing-out. This signals an emerging era of intensified international competition in industrial policy, in which governments increasingly pursue national interests through tariffs, subsidies, and other interventionist measures. This transformation is weakening the liberal foundations of the multilateral trading system. The principle of non-discrimination, particularly most-favoured-nation treatment, may give way to bilateral strategies and plurilateral arrangements among like-minded countries. Yet the United States is unlikely to abandon the WTO; rather, it appears to seek to reshape international rules through their revision, reinterpretation, or selective application. Against this background, de facto plurilateral arrangements, both within and outside the WTO, are becoming increasingly important. The WTO Agreement on Electronic Commerce and the CPTPP illustrate alternative pathways for developing new trade rules. Japan has responded by strengthening economic security while supporting the multilateral system through WTO reform, the MPIA, and the CPTPP. The paper concludes that Japan must move beyond adaptation and articulate an independent vision for the future institutional and normative development of the world trading system.