This thesis answers the question of whether the European Union (EU) Member States have changed their behaviour in order to coordinate EU common representation in the International Labour Organisation (ILO). The study begins in 1973, when European Political Cooperation (EPC) was expanded to include EU Member States coordination in the United Nations, and ends in 2005. The thesis uses archive records and interviews to measure the level of EU representation (issuing common statements) and voting cohesion. The analysis of EU Member States' coordination is divided into technical issues (ILO labour standards) coordinated through the European Community, and political issues coordinated through EPC/CFSP mechanisms. The hypotheses tested are that technical coordination is easier to achieve than political coordination, and over time the Community driven technical coordination will develop more than EPC/CFSP driven political coordination. The core findings are that technical coordination has developed unevenly across particular issue areas and through time, while in political coordination there is evidence of a strong commitment by the EU Member States to maintaining common foreign policy positions. Liberal intergovernmental theory is shown to be the most useful for explaining EU Member State technical coordination. Key evidence includes an examination of the impact of treaties on common representation and voting cohesion, the continued importance of national interests and the European Court of Justice Opinion confirming the primacy of Member States in the ILO. Institutional theory was shown to be the most useful for understanding EU Member State political coordination. Three cases studies were used: the Arab-Israel dispute, apartheid in South Africa promoting core labour standards. Empirical research highlights the social norms and rules of the Geneva diplomats working on EU coordination. The overall conclusion is that the EU Member States remain first and foremost members of the ILO, and speaking for Europe is a secondary concern.

The conflicts between environmental protection and the need to promote developmental growth are becoming increasingly imperative. The concept of sustainable development was created to reconcile the above conflict between these two extremes in order to ensure that an adequate quantity of natural resources and a good quality of environment are preserved for longer term purposes and for the uses of future generations. This study examines the development of this concept at international level and its impacts upon international law governing the use of international watercourses in particular. The Mekong River Basin is analysed as a case study in order to illustrate that this concept has given rise to development of the legal framework of this region. To examine these issues, this study is divided into five chapters. It begins by dealing with development of the concept of sustainable development at international level and issues arising from the law in the field of sustainable development after Rio. Chapter 2 focuses on the impact of this concept upon international watercourses law. Chapter 3 emphasises the significance of the effects of sustainable development upon the legal framework of the Mekong River Basin as indicated in the 1995 Mekong Agreement. Mechanisms adopted in this instrument to implement the above concept are also analysed. Chapter 4 illustrates problems and prospects regarding implementation of the concept of sustainable development and operation of the 1995 Mekong Agreement. Chapter 5 presents a conclusion of the study. This thesis shows that sustainable development is a difficult concept to define and implement. The Mekong Agreement makes an attempt, a laudable one, to implement certain aspects of it in relation to an international watercourse. Some aspects are successfully implemented but some are not. The Mekong Agreement is an important treaty from environmental, sustainable development and water resources points of view.

This thesis recommends a shift in the regulatory paradigm of the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS). GATS relies on binding legal disciplines for governing the multilateral services trade. The thesis argues that this is not an entirely appropriate approach in view of the peculiar nature of the services trade, and may have been the cause of the negligible services trade gains to date. The services trade rule-making in GATS is currently guided by the view that its legal disciplines need to be further strengthened. These disciplines mainly pertain to domestic regulatory measures which affect the services trade. The thesis however supports the argument that more flexible regulatory approaches are better suited to the governance of the multilateral services trade. Drawing some lessons for improving the GATS framework in these terms, the thesis carries out a case study of the financial services trade liberalization in the EU. This case study reveals the use of regulatory innovations in EU governance to make it more effective. Such regulatory innovations are sometimes termed as ‘New Governance’ approaches. They are flexible, deliberative and participatory in nature, and do not rely on binding legal mechanisms. Thus they offer greater potential for protecting EU Members’ regulatory autonomy, whilst executing its trade liberalization agenda. The thesis explores the possibility of utilizing similar approaches in GATS governance. It makes recommendations for improving GATS effectiveness through balancing its trade liberalization objectives with the WTO Members’ domestic regulatory autonomy. A change in the GATS regulatory outlook is seen as a tool to achieve this purpose, with more flexible approaches to governance being a step towards this goal.

My thesis is that the Security Council of the United Nations is still relevant in today's world, but it needs to change to maintain and strengthen its position as the central body for decisions on international peace and security. The key to this position is the concept of legitimacy, which will be explored in the first two chapters. While the first chapter explains what legitimacy means and why it ';tatters in world politics, the second chapter will explore in more detail what factors matter in the sociological conception of legitimacy of international organisations used in this thesis. The indicators arising from this broadly fit into the areas legality, democracy, justice and outcome. These indicators are then used to test how the United Nations Security Council has acted in the two major cases where force has been used with the autliorisation of the United Nations: the Korean War of the 1950s and the first Iraq War fourty years later. Both case studies show that the decision making structure within the United Nations and therefore the authorised wars suffered from major problems in terms of their legitimacy. The final two chapters then take up these problems to look into the proposals that were made to reform the Security Council. The thesis proposes some changes that are not completely unrealistic and that could help the Security Council to become the relevant actor it was supposed to be.

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Although the main purpose of the international judiciary (covering international arbitral, judicial and quasi-judicial procedures) is to settle disputes, it can also perform other tasks: a concept described by Lauterpacht as 'a heterogeny of aims'. This thesis focuses on three other functions which the international judiciary is expected to fulfil in the international society lacking a centralized legislative body and sufficient law enforcement mechanisms, namely standard setting, compliance control and law development. The field of international environmental law is highly suitable for this study, on account of: 1) an abundance of ambiguous rules which demand clear standards for their practical application 2) scientific uncertainty, rapid changeability of situations and non-compliance derived from incapability of States, all of which need special considerations for compliance control and 3) newness of global environmental concern, which necessitates a substantial degree of law development. The above three functions are analyzed from the perspectives of inter-State relations and State-individual relations, on the one hand, and 'soft' control and 'hard' control, on the other. They are integrated into the concept of 'judicial control', whose main purpose lies in containing deviance within acceptable levels through adjudicative means. Several reforms are proposed to facilitate the improved functioning of international environment law through 'judicial control'. The most important in this context is that the international judiciary should ensure active but harmonized interaction of inner-regime law and outer-regime law. Thus even if the international judiciary is attached to a certain treaty-regime, it can make considerable use of the advantages of 'judicial control' over 'non-judicial control', namely its capacity to control States' compliance with outer-regime law, and to clarify a certain norm's meaning for all States in the international society.

'This thesis interrogates NATO’s claim to have acted responsibly when intervening in the Libyan crisis in 2011- Engaging with a conceptual framework inspired by the work of Jacque Derrida, this thesis analyses NATO’s use of institutional memory in the production of its claim to responsibility, or to have done the ‘right thing’, when intervening militarily in Libya. As such, this thesis utilizes a form of critical discourse analysis to examine the construction of NATO’s institutional memory; something this thesis finds to be intertextually constituted through a combination of both institutional and cultural texts. Found to be imbued by a colonial framework — that which, historically, works to relegate, silence and marginalise the subaltern other — this thesis finds NATO’s institutional memory to be contingent in NATO’s production of responsibility in Libya. This is demonstrated through an engagement with three principal themes: origin, familiarity, and futures. Examining these themes allows this thesis to reveal how NATO’s institutional memory is constructed as possessing a singular, linear, and hegemonic status, thereby effacing alternative understandings of the past, present, and future in order to convey a certainty of knowledge about them. It is this certainty of knowledge that NATO then applies in the production of its responsibility, enabling that responsibility to be produced as equally knowable. Criticising this finding, this thesis argues that memory (and thus responsibility) cannot be as certain as NATO impresses in its dealings with Libya. Stressing that the responsible decision always requires a necessary and unavoidable engagement with the political, this thesis concludes by contending that NATO can never actually know whether it has made the responsible decision or, indeed, what the nature of that decision is. Instead, NATO must live with its responsibility/irresponsibility: the condition of the responsible decision if there is to be one.

In recent years there has been a likely increase in the incidence of decommissioning of offshore oil and gas installations and considerable dissension has arisen over the legal aspects of decomissioning. There is controversy as to the applicable rules of international law. There is also dissension as to adequacy of both international and state laws and practices in providing for the various interests identified by international law itself as vital to any consideration of the manner in which disused installations ought to be disposed of. The thesis therefore examines the international legal regime of the continental shelf, on which most offshore oil and gas installations are located. There is also a review of relevant principles of the law of the sea as well as other maritime zones known to international law. A comparative study is undertaken of law and practice on abandonment in six jurisdictions, selected as fairly representative of oil-producing regions of the world. Those jusrisdictions are Australia, Kuwait, Nigeria, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States. From the analysis, it hoped to ascertain representative state practice on abandonment. In view of the issue within the abandonment controversy as to whether or not Article 60(3) UNCLOS and the IMO Guidelines 1989 had become customary international law rules there is analysys of the concept of customary international law. Following that analysis, a model or paradigm is developed for use in assessing the emergence of new norms of customary international law. The objective is that the emergence of the new model will in the future enable the objective, expeditious and forthright assessment of contended rules of customary international law. The work goes further to consider whether the IMO Guidelines achieved a strategic balancing of the contending interests set out in Article 60 (3) and tries to postulate the reasons why those rules and Guidelines failed following the Brent Spar incident. Aspects of the legal-economic theory of regulatory capture are considered as apposite. The work concludes by identifying new and emerging trends in relation to abandonment practices and concludes with a postulation and as well as proposals as to how abandonment is expected to develop into the future.

The topic “Intellectual Property Rights Infringement on the Internet: An Analysis of the Private International Law Implications” has become increasingly important as the Internet has revolutionized the traditional understanding of the rules of private international law which govern the determination of jurisdiction in the case of intellectual property rights infringement over the Internet. The private international law of intellectual property has until recently been both straightforward and based on traditions, geographical boundaries and physical space. However, the ubiquitous nature of the Internet has brought new challenges in the area of the private international law of intellectual property, which lawmakers, judges and lawyers have to deal with. In particular, the private international law of intellectual property needs somehow address the fact that many of the actions and effects of intellectual property rights infringement within the territory of a particular Member State will not actually have physically taken place there. For example, material protected by intellectual property law can be uploaded in one state, downloaded in another, and viewed in a large number of other states. This means that the intellectual property rights infringers and the owners of intellectual property rights are often miles apart, while the infringers might never have set foot in the country or region where the harm occurs. Moreover, damage is typically suffered in multiple states simultaneously. Therefore, the question of which national authorities have jurisdiction over matters theoretically located in cyberspace is the first point of interest for every intellectual property rights owner whose rights are infringed over the Internet. Thus, the main aim of this work is to identify the problems and provide jurisdictional solutions with regard to the application of the existing jurisdictional rules according to the Council Regulation 1215/2012 on Jurisdiction and the Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Civil and Commercial Matters in the case of intellectual property rights infringement over the Internet. For without clear and effective jurisdictional rules of intellectual property rights infringement over the Internet, the internal market cannot function properly.

State Aid policy has been an integral part of competition policy and the European Commission is responsible for controlling aid, which distorts competition in the internal market to be granted by Member States. State Aid is usually defined as advantages given by the State to undertakings in the form of financial contributions, support, or other forms of special treatment. This thesis will examine state aid policy and regulation in the European Union. The research aims at critically analysing the implementation of the rules that compose the European state aid framework and conclude on whether the system for the control of state aid is set in an effective way to achieve the objectives of protecting competition and therefore the internal market by limiting aid levels and streaming aid towards more beneficial aid. This research is important because it can reveal the particular benefits and problems caused by state aid and help by making recommendations for the future application of the rules.