International Law Archive

Editor’s note: This article is part of an ongoing WPR series on the South China Sea territorial disputes and the various claimant countries’ approaches to addressing them. When Chinese President Xi Jinping visited Hanoi early last month, he did so with understandable fanfare and scrutiny. His was the first visit to Vietnam by a Chinese president in a decade. It came just weeks before the annual ASEAN and East Asia Summits, and only a few months ahead of the Vietnamese Communist Party congress to be held in early 2016. Given the timing, observers in China and Vietnam, as well as […]

Depending on whom you talk to and what month it is, the United States and the European Union are either on the brink of a digital trade war or reaching a historic e-commerce deal. EU-U.S. cooperation over the trans-Atlantic digital economy seemed to first fall apart in October 2015, when the European Court of Justice (ECJ) struck down a critical data-sharing deal known as the Safe Harbor Agreement. In doing so, Europe’s highest court put major companies such as Facebook and IBM at risk of breaching EU privacy law by simply conducting their day-to-day business operations. National data-privacy authorities have […]

Is it time for Ban Ki-moon to quit? This is not an obvious moment for United Nations secretary-general to do so. His second term is set to finish at the end of this year anyway. The race to replace him is heating up, with a posse of politicians from Eastern Europe jostling for the lead. Ban is not very secretly planning to run for the presidency of South Korea next year, and there has been speculation that he could leave New York early to campaign. But for now, U.N. officials and diplomats seem to think he’ll last the course. Having […]

Although its previously explosive economic growth has slowed, China’s growing geopolitical clout continues to reshape the balance of power, regionally and beyond. From its relations with the U.S. and its aggressive actions in the South China Sea, to its regional foreign policy and economic prospects, China remains a mixed bag of promise, risk and uncertainty. The following articles are free for non-subscribers until Feb. 18. Testing Time for U.S.-China Ties Xi’s Visit Exposes Mismatch in U.S. and Chinese Expectations Following Chinese President Xi Jinping’s visit to Washington last September, Timothy R. Heath wrote that incremental progress in relations has “been […]