مجله حقوقی بین المللی
پیاپی 68 (زمستان 1401)

Blocking statutes are enacted to neutralize the effects of third-country extraterritorial laws and, on the one hand, prohibit all covered persons from complying with these laws and, on the other hand, provide protective measures to protect covered persons against damages caused by non-compliance. The European Union passed the Blocking Regulation to counteract the effects of US unilateral sanctions against Iran, Libya, and Cuba. The Regulation was amended after the withdrawal of the United States from the JCPOA, then, another US sanction law against Iran was blocked. Currently, the covered persons face a dilemma; they are punished by American authorities in the case of violating US extraterritorial sanctions in their contractual relations with US-sanctioned operators. In return,they also may be fined by their countries if they comply with the Blocked Laws because of violating the Blocking Regulation. The hypothesis of the article is that irrespective of applying administrative and criminal sanctions in the case of violation of the Blocking Regulation by the covered persons, from the civil viewpoint, the sanctioned person being a party to the contract with covered persons can litigate and invoke this Regulation against them. The claimant can ask the dispute resolution tribunals to enforce the covered undertaking.

One of the factors in the different implementation of a treaty is that countries implement the treaty according to the text approved in their domestic systems, while this text may differ from the authenticated texts of the treaty. Therefore the compatibility of Persian and non-Persian texts of treaties is important. Nevertheless, reviewing the Iranian Acts and Regulations indicate that many of the arrangements for this compatibility are not foreseen and even "Regulation on How to prepare and Conclude International Agreements" of 1371 and "Guidelines for the Formalization of International Legal Agreements" of 1390 could not fix this defect. In addition, although the relevant institutions in the ratification of a treaty have been able in some cases, by recognizing the incompatibility between the texts, to provide amendment of Persian text, however, there are still significant errors in the Persian text of many treaties, and implementation of some of them, has led to Iran's condemnation by international institutions. Reviewing the Iranian laws in the field of preparing the Persian text of the treaty and monitoring its compliance with the authenticated texts is the first step to eliminate the shortcomings of these laws and the present article has been written with this aim.

The role of the means rea in the realization of intentional crimes is undeniable and it is absolutely necessary for the attribution of the crime to the offender, regardless of the realm of national or international law. An important document in this regard is Article 30 of the Statute of the International Criminal Court and the practical procedure of this Court. But the important question that is constantly being asked is how is the means rea of the abet crime in international crimes organized? First of all, it seems that there is no need for the means rea of the perpetrator and his abet to be the same, and the mere knowledge of the abet is sufficient for the occurrence of the crime. Secondly, there is no need for the existence of the mentioned spiritual element to be obvious, but it is possible that with the help of all the circumstances, the abet's intent to be discovered and the spiritual element will be revealed. Finally, in order to form the means rea of the abet in crime, negligence and severe negligence must also be included in the category of intent in the abet.

There is almost a consensus, in the case-law of the International Court of Justice and the opinions of its Judges, as well as in the doctrine, regarding the non-binding nature of the Advisory Opinions of the Court. However, for a variety of reasons, including the position of the Court as the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, similar process for Judgments and Advisory Opinions to be taken into account by the Judges, the weight and credibility of the Judges of the Court, and putting the status of Advisory Opinions to no avail providing they are invalid, there is a disagreement about the legal effects of the Advisory Opinions of the International Court of Justice. The very recent ruling by the Special Chamber of the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea in the Mauritius/ Maldives case in the preliminary objections, which relied on the International Court of Justice's 2019 Advisory Opinion’s findings in the “Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965”, led to the rejection of one of the Maldivian government's preliminary objections which bring about the effect of Advisory Opinion’s topic to the center of international law once again.

One of the Russia's implicit legal pretexts in recognition of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts' independence in Ukraine is the realization of remedial secession (RS) theory as to these republics. The authors of the present article, through a descriptive-analytical method, aim at investigating the applicability of RS theory on the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts independence in Ukraine. It appears that, due to the non-realization of the main conditions of RS namely the systematic, gross and long-term violation of human rights of the separatist group and lack of an alternative for secession and taking into account the situation of these oblasts in the framework of Ukraine and Minsk I and II agreements between the central government and the leaders of these two oblasts, resorting to RS theory to justify the unilateral secession, and as a consequence, recognition by Russia of Donetsk and Luhansk' independence has no legal basis. The authors maintain that Russia's act in resorting to this rule for justifying its military measure can be assessed as an instrumental use of a progressive theory to achieve a non-civilized goal.

Space mining is one of the new space activities. Since the minerals in the Moon and other celestial bodies have high quality, it is foreseeable that they could be exploited and used in industries, including military and weaponry. Due to this fact, it is essential to understand the position of international law on the use of space minerals in the production of military equipments and weapons. In the first step, the present article highlights the necessity of ending or at least restricting space mining and the production of weapons in order to protect international peace and security by analyzing the basic principles contained in the Outer Space Treaty. In the next step and beyond conventional system of space law, the use of mineral resources of celestial bodies has been evaluated in the context of the documents on sustainable development of space activities. The aim of the present study is to take an important step towards maintaining and establishing international peace and security in outer space by clarifying the legal aspects of the military exploitation of the mineral resources of celestial bodies.

Universality of common human values embedded in declarations and international treaties supposed to be evident in the international human rights legal system but it does not mean that there were no intellectual discrepancies behind those instruments. Universality of human rights has its roots more than anything on theories of Jhon locke's natural law and Immanuel kant's rational ethics. But one of the earliest philosophers of opposition side against unity of human nature and universal morality at the embryonic stage was Nietzsche. Bringing forth the theory of will to power by adopting a psychological genealogy method Nietzsche distinguished between two moralities: Masters Morality and Slaves Morality. He attributed human rights as slave morality. Slaves revolted with the spirit of resentment and womanish deception against masters then introduced their own qualities as standard and universal. The Rise of Christianity and the Great French Revolution are amongst two biggest examples of such slave revolt in morality. With such a presupposition, trying by any effort to reconcile human rights morals with Nietzschean views seems to be unachievable. While reviewing past philosophical challenges, this article tries to analyze necessity of co-existence both international human rights legal system and Nietzschean world from a new perspective.