Paparinskis, Martins; (2024) Reflections on War in Ukraine and International Law. In: Asada, Masahiko and Tamada, Dai, (eds.) War in Ukraine and International Law. (pp. 239-246). Springer: Singapore.

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Abstract

The starting point for my reflections is the call by Masahiko Asada in the conclusion of Chapter ‘The War in Ukraine Under International Law: Its Use of Force and Armed Conflict Aspects’ for ‘focus on how to respond to this unprecedented crisis in the rule of law and what to do with it in order to avoid its recurrence’. The whole volume may be read as an extended response, applying the vocabulary of public international law to explain, in predominantly doctrinal terms, the war in Ukraine and the responses thereto by the international legal process. The authors do so with an eye to what one might call the ‘traditional’ topics of international law: use of force, countermeasures, individual criminal responsibility, and international courts and tribunals. That is not the only disciplinary perspective that could be taken, nor the only framing and the choice of topics—public international law is not just a discipline of crisis, as famously pointed out by Hilary Charlesworth. But one need not take this important point about the plurality of values and interests in various fields of international law too far for the sake of contrarianism. Public international law does play an important role in shaping the way how international crises are addressed and is in turn particularly likely to be shaped by them. Indeed, in the otherwise very different contemporary crises one reads about in the frontpages of daily newspapers, the one recurrent theme is the importance attributed by the relevant actors to the tools and mechanisms of international law. The docket of the International Court of Justice (ICJ and the Court) illustrates the point well. So it has been for the war in Ukraine.

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