LCIL Friday Lecture: 'Compensation under International Law and the International Law Commission' - Martins Paparinskis, UCL

A recording of this lecture is available on the University's Streaming Media Service

Lecture summary: ‘Is there an international law of remedies?’ asked Cambridge’s very own Christine Gray in 1985. The United Kingdom was sceptical in the 1993 UN General Assembly’s Sixth Committee, with a particular reference to compensation: ‘The international law of remedies was piecemeal and undeveloped … . Many of the authorities culled by the [International Law Commission’s] Special Rapporteur [on State responsibility Arangio-Ruiz] were somewhat old, and there was a legitimate question of how far the guidance they provided remained valid for the current times.’ Yet within eight years the International Law Commission (ILC) adopted the 2001 Articles on responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, following Special Rapporteur James Crawford’s proposal on a provision on compensation in Article 36, without much scholarly controversy or indeed (mostly) even interest. Since then, compensation under international law has been increasingly addressed by international courts and tribunals, and may well play an important role in disputes about war reparations, environmental damage, and historical wrongs. In this lecture, Martins Paparinskis will explain the peculiarities of the international legal order of the 1990s that shaped the Commission’s assumptions regarding compensation, consider the fit of Article 36 within the international legal process of the following two decades, and sketch  the direction for possible future developments.

Martins Paparinskis is Professor of Public International Law at University College London and a member designate of the International Law Commission. He is a generalist international lawyer with a particular interest in State responsibility and dispute settlement as well as the specialist fields of investment law, human rights law, and transboundary water law, and has published on these topics in leading peer reviewed journals.   

Papers for pre-reading ahead of the lecture:

The Once and Future Law of State Responsibility

A Case Against Crippling Compensation in International Law of State Responsibility

Crippling Compensation in the International Law Commission and Investor–State Arbitration

Chaired by: Professor Sandesh Sivakumaran

Sandwich lunch in the Old Library from 12.30 pm.

The Lauterpacht Centre Friday lecture series is kindly supported by Cambridge University Press