The last fortnight has been dominated by two major developments: the proceedings initiated by deep-seabed mining contractors before the ITLOS Seabed Disputes Chamber, and the ICJ’s Right to Strike Advisory Opinion. Interventions have also grappled with different institutional silences around Israel’s policies in Gaza and the West Bank, from Eurovision to the Human Rights Committee and the Committee Against Torture. Reform attempts at UNCITRAL and within the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty regime have failed to inspire great confidence, while small open economies struggle to insure against supply crises without chafing against WTO rules. Among various nascent norms discussed over the last two weeks, is also a positive duty to protect the right to life in cases of counter-terrorism intelligence failure, emerging in the human rights courts either side of the Atlantic.

The case against deep-seabed mining 

, and argue that recent advisory opinions by the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights strengthen the case against deep-seabed mining by affirming that the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment  is both inherent in and necessary for the enjoyment of other fundamental rights. Environmental harms from deep-seabed mining, even in remote areas beyond national jurisdiction, can engage states’ human rights obligations because degradation of marine ecosystems has foreseeable transboundary effects on human well-being. Perhaps the most legally consequential aspect of the IACtHR’s advisory opinion is its recognition that prohibitions against conduct causing irreversible harm to the planet’s ecological equilibrium may possess jus cogens status. Accordingly, where scientific evidence indicates a risk of irreversible biodiversity loss or ecosystem damage from deep-seabed mining, states may be required to refrain from authorizing such activities to avoid breaching both human rights obligations and emerging peremptory norms of international law.

…and two cases for? Stress test at the Seabed Disputes Chamber 

The International Seabed Authority (ISA)’s compliance mechanisms under UNCLOS are being put to the test by two applications lodged with the Seabed Disputes Chamber (SDC). These applications by two deep-seabed mining contractors, NORI and TOML, have been submitted against a backdrop of considerable institutional uncertainty, prompted by the US’s unilateral move to issue exploration licenses and commercial recovery permits outside the UNCLOS framework (discussed here and here). NORI and TOML are both subsidiaries of The Metals Company, whose US subsidiary has applied for licences under the US regime. The applications before the SDC concern the deferral of permit extensions and challenge an ongoing ISA compliance inquiry on grounds of due process and non-discrimination, seeking an immediate order halting the inquiry.

, and argue that these claims are misconceived on three grounds. The contractors are challenging internal communications of the ISA’s Legal Technical Commission (LTC) during an ongoing inquiry rather than any binding Council decision, raising serious questions about whether a justiciable “dispute” within the SDC’s Article 187 UNCLOS jurisdiction has yet crystallised. The non-discrimination claim under Article 152 UNCLOS is undermined by the LTC Chair’s contemporaneous explanation that deferral of the two permit extensions was based on contract expiry dates and workload. And the due process argument misconstrues the applicable LTC guidelines, which contemplate contractor engagement only after internal identification of a compliance risk, not before. The requested remedies—effectively requiring the SDC to supervise the ISA’s exercise of discretionary regulatory functions—fall outside the Chamber’s institutional remit under Articles 187-190 UNCLOS. The applications amount to an attempt to pre-empt ordinary compliance scrutiny at a moment when the contractors’ parent company is separately attempting to bypass the ISA altogether in favour of unilaterally granted US mining rights.

takes us into the institutional stakes of these procedural rights within the ISA’s compliance architecture under UNCLOS Part XI, and the extent to which administrative judgments made in the pre-exploitation phase can shape access to commercial exploitation. The two cases, while arising from the same compliance inquiry, travel distinct routes: NORI’s turns on whether an adverse finding might contaminate the LTC’s concurrent consideration of its imminent contract extension, while TOML’s concerns the reputational and regulatory harm of being designated a compliance risk before any formal exploitation application arises. Together they illustrate how exploitation-related disputes can crystallise well before the exploitation phase formally opens. The requests for provisional measures, which seek to suspend the inquiry entirely and prevent any of its findings from being communicated or relied upon, create “procedural compression”, forcing the Chamber to address questions of institutional authority, plausibility of rights, and irreparable prejudice on an accelerated timetable. An applicant-friendly ruling would impose procedural constraints on ISA’s regulatory conduct, while an ISA-friendly ruling would itself generate early jurisprudential material clarifying the boundaries of contractor rights in the pre-exploitation legal order.

The death penalty for terrorists in Israel

On 29 April 2026, the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) expressed alarm at Israel’s “Death Penalty for Terrorists Law”, urging its immediate repeal. and start from here to examine a more troubling phenomenon: the conspicuous silence of the Human Rights Committee (HRC) and the Committee Against Torture (CAT), both of which had clear mandates and available procedural tools to respond. The silence is particularly difficult to justify given that the HRC has previously intervened on retrogressive capital punishment measures outside its ordinary reporting cycle (Liberia 2008, Philippines 2017, Belarus 2022), and the CAT had already flagged the draft law in its December 2025 concluding observations on Israel. Not to mention that Article 6(2) ICCPR created an opening of rare historical significance to clarify the relationship between the ICCPR and the Genocide Convention at a moment when the ICJ has already ordered provisional measures on genocide grounds. While there may be structural explanations for the silence, such as resource constraints or consensus-based working methods, none of these is satisfactory. What is needed are shared working methods that would systematically trigger internal discussion of public intervention in paradigmatic cross-cutting crises, and greater experimentation with calibrated joint or parallel statements.

Eurovision and the fraught neutrality of cultural institutions

Israel came second in this year’s Eurovision Song Contest, while Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, Slovenia, and Iceland stayed away in protest.  invites us to think carefully about the normalising power of institutions, and the complex connections between law and culture. He argues that cultural institutions such as Eurovision cannot credibly rely on claims of neutrality when participation becomes intertwined with state legitimacy, public diplomacy, and the normalization of situations subject to serious international legal scrutiny. Drawing on Article 41(2) of the ILC’s Articles on State Responsibility and the ICJ’s Namibia, Wall, and OPT advisory opinions, he contends that the principle of non-recognition extends beyond formal diplomacy to encompass institutional practices that may normalize unlawful situations. While cultural participation does not itself constitute legal recognition—and broadcasters such as the Israeli Public Broadcasting Corporation are distinct from governments—state-backed promotional campaigns and public diplomacy can make neutrality functionally equivalent to normalization. Organizations like the European Broadcasting Union should adopt transparent, consistent criteria for assessing when participation risks legitimizing conduct under serious international legal condemnation, rather than treating cultural engagement as legally irrelevant.

Institutional reform: nuclear non-proliferation and UNCITRAL

The 2026 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference failed to adopt a consensus outcome document. sees this as a reflection of deeper, longstanding structural divisions within the NPT regime—not merely of current geopolitical crises. While disagreements over issues such as Iran’s safeguards violations, Russia’s war against Ukraine, and the DPRK’s nuclear programme contributed to the impasse, the core fault line is competing interpretations of Article VI. Nuclear-weapon states and non-nuclear-weapon states remain sharply divided over whether it requires the eventual elimination of nuclear weapons or merely incremental arms-control measures. Even a revival of arms-control agreements and strategic stability would not resolve frustrations among many non-nuclear-weapon states, who view the NPT’s “grand bargain” as unfulfilled as long as nuclear-weapon states continue to reject legally binding commitments to complete disarmament. Although the regime is unlikely to collapse in the short term, since most states continue to see value in the NPT, entrenched power asymmetries make meaningful progress toward nuclear disarmament unlikely, leaving the treaty system trapped in a cycle of recurring deadlock.

turns our attention to the proposed UNCITRAL Advisory Centre on International Investment Dispute Resolution. He argues that it addresses a genuine access-to-justice problem for developing states in investor–state dispute settlement (ISDS), but its current design too closely replicates the model of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) without adequately accounting for the greater cost and complexity of investment arbitration. While the Centre’s legal assistance functions could help reduce structural inequalities between states and investors, its projected budget of roughly USD 5 million, limited staffing, and reliance on membership fees and service charges are unlikely to meet the substantial demand from least developed and developing countries facing ISDS claims. The Centre’s technical assistance activities may also duplicate work already performed by organisations such as UNCITRAL and UNCTAD: its comparative advantage lies in direct legal representation rather than capacity-building. Unless its funding model and operational capacity are significantly expanded, the Advisory Centre may struggle to provide the effective and affordable legal support necessary to fulfil its objective of improving developing states’ participation in ISDS.

Right to Strike Advisory Opinion

In its 21 May 2026 advisory opinion on ILO Convention No. 87, the ICJ held—by ten votes to four—that the freedom of association provisions protect the right to strike, resolving a long-standing interpretive dispute within the ILO supervisory system. On the methodological question of treaty body output, the Court established a three-part framework: supervisory body pronouncements are not, in themselves, “subsequent practice” establishing agreement under VCLT Article 31(3)(b); they may operate derivatively under that provision where they generate or reflect state practice meeting the agreement threshold; and they qualify as “supplementary means” of interpretation under VCLT Article 32, to be accorded “great weight”—extending the formula first developed for the UN Human Rights Committee in Ahmadou Sadio Diallo.

 argues that this third move is the most significant: the mutatis mutandis qualification the Court applies to structurally varied bodies (such as the tripartite Committee on Freedom of Association and the political International Labour Conference) should temper any straightforward transposition of the framework to other regimes, including UN human rights treaty bodies and compliance committees such as the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee. The debate should now shift from the threshold question of admissibility—settled in favour of Article 32—toward the more granular question of which criteria determine the weight to be accorded to particular categories of supervisory body output.

notes that the ICJ declined to clarify whether its opinion is binding under Article 37(1), leaving unresolved a question that has been debated for decades within the ILO. He puts the case that although advisory opinions are generally non-binding under Article 94(1) of the UN Charter and Article 59 of the ICJ Statute, an opinion rendered under Article 37(1) of the ILO Constitution may have a distinct legal effect because that provision requires disputes to be referred to the Court “for decision.” The binding force would derive not from the Court’s advisory jurisdiction itself, but from the treaty commitment embodied in Article 37(1): this is supported by the Court’s treatment of similar provisions in cases such as Judgments of the Administrative Tribunal of the ILO upon Complaints Made against UNESCO (1956) and Application for Review of Judgment No. 158 (1973). Denying binding effect would render Article 37(1) largely meaningless within the ILO’s tripartite system, where Workers’ and Employers’ groups lack international legal personality and rely on the provision as a dispute-settlement mechanism. 

Surviving supply crises? Preferential agreements between small open economies 

pulls focus on the New Zealand-Singapore Agreement on Trade in Essential Supplies (AOTES), signed 4 May 2026, which turns an earlier political commitment of keeping certain essential supplies flowing into a hard treaty rule that limits each party’s ability to restrict certain exports during supply crises. This preference is difficult to justify under existing WTO non-discrimination disciplines. Article XIII’s requirement of non-discriminatory administration of quantitative restrictions is engaged where one partner is exempted from export restrictions applied to other Members. Article XXIV provides no general cover for crisis-time discrimination under an already-existing FTA (per Turkey – Textiles). Article XX(j)’s equitable-share principle (confirmed in India – Solar Cells) and the chapeau’s arbitrariness test (as applied in Brazil – Retreaded Tyres) both sit uneasily with a partner-only exemption. And Article XXI offers only marginal assistance absent a genuine security emergency. The central distinction is between resilience-building measures—trade facilitation, logistics coordination, and joint procurement undertaken before a shortage materialises—which are legally unproblematic. And commitments that privilege one partner after export restrictions are imposed, which are problematic. Small open economies seeking a durable legal basis for partner preference should pursue an express WTO-level instrument, whether a waiver or a new substantive rule, rather than relying on bilateral treaty commitments that current WTO law cannot readily accommodate.

Counter-terrorism intelligence failure and the right to life

The European and Inter-American human rights courts have long recognised a positive duty on states to protect the right to life from third-party threats, but neither had previously applied that duty specifically to failures of preventive intelligence in counter-terrorism. argues that this gap is now gradually being closed by two judgments arising from the 2004 Beslan school siege and the 1994 Buenos Aires AMIA bombing respectively. Tagayeva and Others v. Russia (ECtHR, Article 2 ECHR) and Asociación Civil Memoria Activa v. Argentina (IACtHR, Articles 4(1) and 5 ACHR)—the latter citing the former—together articulate an emerging “intelligence-failure standard” comprising four elements: i) prior availability or required generation of actionable intelligence; ii) convertibility of a general threat picture into a specific situational picture against an identifiable target (a qualified threshold, by contrast to the canonical Osman and Pueblo Bello tests); iii) absence of the organisational architecture necessary to effect that conversion; and iv) materialisation of harm. The 9/11 Commission Report, while produced entirely outside either treaty system, independently corroborates the same organisational diagnosis, lending the standard a cross-jurisdictional robustness that suggests it is a genuinely convergent doctrinal development rather than an artefact of any single human rights regime.

Events and announcements, as ever, can be found here.