The tub-thumping and bomb-dumping of the first half of the year would seem to have receded into background noise for now, giving space for other reflections—from the maps we use to understand the world, to the influence of AI on the fruits of scholarship and the roots of international law. Also in focus are reparations for slavery under contemporaneous international law, memory politics and guarantees of non-recurrence, high moral character at the ICC and low moral conduct of state-owned companies abroad, as well as the regulation of autonomous ships. Not to mention the striking out of 879 claims against Russia for violations of human rights violations in the Russia-Ukraine war.
Slavery and reparations
Britta Redwood examines Jamaica’s September 2026 petition asking King Charles III to refer questions concerning slavery and reparations to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council under section 4 of the Judicial Committee Act 1833. She identifies significant legal difficulties in asking whether transatlantic slavery constituted a crime against humanity, notably inter-temporal law and the predominantly individual character of international criminal responsibility, but argues that questions of state responsibility and the legality of slavery under contemporaneous international law remain open to argument. Most significantly, the petition links reparations to the continuing consequences of slavery, potentially engaging present-day international human rights obligations concerning racial discrimination independent of the legality of slavery when practised.
Maritime autonomous surface ships
Cedric Pfeiler takes a look at the International Maritime Organisation’s new non-mandatory International Codes of Safety for Maritime Autonomous Surface Ships. In particular, how it interacts with the due diligence obligation of flag states to exercise effective jurisdiction and control over their ships under Article 94 UNCLOS. Drawing on the ITLOS’s SRFC and Area advisory opinions and the ICJ’s Pulp Mills judgment, he argues that effective monitoring and enforcement of autonomous vessels requires reliable access to operational data stored on servers that may lie outside the flag state’s jurisdiction. Because private contractual arrangements cannot overcome foreign data laws such as the EU GDPR or China’s restrictions on cross-border transfers, flag states must establish public international law arrangements with states exercising jurisdiction over relevant servers if they are to satisfy Article 94’s due diligence standard.
Memory politics and guarantees of non-recurrence
Twenty-six years ago, Minas Gerais enacted a law creating a Human Rights Memorial in the building that once housed the state’s Department of Political and Social Order (DOPS), a police body central to dictatorship-era repression. I still has not been officially converted. Estéfany Rocha Monteiro takes this as a way into reflecting on the content of guarantees of non-recurrence under international law. Drawing on Article 2 ICCPR, General Comment No. 31, the Updated Set of Principles to Combat Impunity, and the UN Basic Principles on Remedy and Reparation, she argues that general initiatives such as mapping or signage cannot substitute for site-specific measures addressing preservation, access, institutional control, and meaningful participation by victims and civil society. There should be a practical test for memorialisation as a guarantee of non-recurrence: transforming sites of past repression, and the relationship between public authority, victims, and memory embodied in them, can itself form part of the state’s international legal obligations.
Russia-Ukraine at the ECtHR
Daniil Ukhorskiy mounts a critique of the ECtHR’s decision in Lebedeva and Others v. Russia to strike out 879 applications under Article 37(1)(c) ECHR, a decision affecting almost 1,500 applicants. The claims were struck out principally on grounds of judicial economy and Russia’s non-engagement with the Convention system. While accepting the need for docket prioritisation, he argues that the Court introduced insufficiently defined criteria, in particular ‘marked importance’ and ‘conflict-related’ cases. These produced arbitrary distinctions and departed from the approach in cases such as Burmych and Others v. Ukraine and Turan and Others v. Turkey. In this case, modest efficiency gains should have been outweighed by the declaratory, truth-telling, and participatory value of judgments for victims—and Russia’s withdrawal from the Convention should have strengthened rather than diminished the case for adjudicating their claims.
Peer-reviewing AI
Niccolò Ridi examines EJIL’s 2026 generative-AI policy, in particular its requirement that an author’s intellectual contribution clearly outweigh that of Gen AI. Can this distinction can reliably be enforced? A stylometric analysis of EJIL:Talk! and Opinio Juris identifies a substantial post-2022 shift consistent with increased LLM-assisted writing, while experiments with AI detectors such Pangram show that even relatively accurate tools cannot determine the respective intellectual contributions of human and model. Policies regulating authorship and provenance should not become de facto regulation of stylistic resemblance: AI detection may justify further inquiry, but cannot itself establish authorship or misconduct.
Correct the Map
Hendrik Mathis Drößler examines the UN General Assembly’s September 2026 ‘Correct the Map’ initiative, which promotes equal-area projections such as Equal Earth, while stressing that endorsement of a projection does not imply acceptance of particular territorial boundaries. Drawing on Frontier Dispute, Temple of Preah Vihear and Pedra Branca, Henrdik distinguishes the cartographic representation of geographical scale from the potential evidentiary and legal significance of maps depicting sovereignty and borders. The implementation by UN bodies must respect existing duties of non-recognition, including regarding Crimea and the Occupied Palestinian Territory, while state practice surrounding implementation may eventually clarify opinio iuris concerning how territorial status should be represented in official cartography.
High moral character at the ICC
Carina Bury criticises the ICC’s handling of the ‘high moral character’ requirement under Article 36(3)(a) of the Rome Statute ahead of the December 2026 judicial elections. By removing Karim Khan, the Assembly of States Parties set down a principle which it now has to live by: serious misconduct disqualifies, even at the very top. Yet in its recent report on judicial nominations, the Advisory Committee on Nominations failed to reach a conclusion on the high moral character of a single one of the judges nominated. The reason appears to be that the Independent Oversight Mechanism’s due-diligence review was incomplete. Yes the the election is proceeding regardless. The report should be disclosed to States Parties before voting and the Assembly must establish transparent and predictable timelines and evidentiary standards for vetting judges and prosecutors: otherwise an incomplete character assessment may effectively become a clearance through institutional silence.
AI and the structures of international law
Though it may not always seem so, AI is not just a headache for peer-reviewers and journal editors: some suggest it is beginning to reshape the deeper structures of international law itself.
Loqman Radpey and Frédéric Mégret argue that international lawyers have focused too narrowly on regulating AI as an external technology, overlooking how AI is already becoming part of the infrastructure through which states exercise sovereign authority and through which international law operates. As computational systems increasingly shape evidence, risk classification, and decision-making in areas such as sanctions, migration, export controls, and security, divergent AI infrastructures may produce new ‘algorithmic geographies of international law’ that fragment not merely legal norms but the underlying production of legally relevant facts. The warning is this: we may touch-typing our way towards a ‘facticity crisis,’ in which international lawyers can no longer reliably identify state practice as genuinely reflecting state judgment, potentially destabilising the foundations on which international legal authority is constructed.
One such foundation is the customary international law obligation to respect state sovereignty, to which Tsvetelina van Benthem turns our attention. There are two ways in which AI complicates this obligation: the growing designation of AI systems and supporting infrastructure as critical infrastructure or essential services, and the possibility of AI systems causing unintended cross-border interference. Drawing on states’ positions on international law in cyberspace, she argues that critical infrastructure status does not create independent international law protection but may inform whether an operation’s nature, effects, or interference with inherently governmental functions crosses the sovereignty threshold. There is further substantial uncertainty over whether intent is required for a sovereignty violation, an increasingly important question for autonomous or misaligned AI systems. We need clearer state practice and opinio iuris on whether responsibility can arise for unintended AI-enabled interference.
Responsibility for state-owned companies abroad
Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde uses the dispute over Statkraft’s Pilmaiquén hydropower projects in Chile to identify a gap between the conventional doctrines of attribution and extraterritorial human rights jurisdiction where a state-owned enterprise causes human rights risks abroad. Drawing on UNGP Principle 4, CESCR General Comment No. 24, and OECD standards, he argues that state ownership should constitute a distinct nexus requiring heightened human rights due diligence, even though such an obligation has not yet crystallised as binding international law. Norway’s Supreme Court judgment in Fosen is relevant not because it applies extraterritorially, but because it establishes Norway’s knowledge that renewable energy projects can threaten the material conditions of Indigenous cultural life protected by Article 27 ICCPR. Ownership-based due diligence should be both knowledge-sensitive and sufficiently preventive to address irreversible harm before it occurs.