max planck encyclopedia of international ... - mpi.lu · forensic evidence pilot judgment prima...

leaks

dissenting opinion

courtroom layout

off-the-bench writings

forensic evidence

pilot judgment

prima facie jurisdiction

four-corners doctrine

itlos trust fund

affidavit

regime failure

case filtering

MAX PLANCK ENCYCLOPEDIA

OF INTERNATIONAL PROCEDURAL

LAW

icsid list

expert judges

guilty plea

law clerk EiPro

site visit

iura novit curia

alibi

urgency

cross debarment

sequencing

self-recusation

registry

litigation team

legal aid

ceremonial

procedural soft law

judicial activism

double deontology

conflict of interest

revirement

judicial regret

archive

priority case

pretrial

motions

kompetenz-kompetenz

self-referral

Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution Max Planck Institute Luxembourg for Procedural Law

casting vote

oath

victims

Table of Contents

1. Scope 42. Method 53. Expected Audiences 54. Structure 65. Scientific Advisory Board and In-House Team 96. Organisation and Timeline 9

EiPro at a Glance

© Max Planck Institute Luxembourg. Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution

By early 2019, Oxford University Press will start publishing online the Max Planck Ency-clopedia of International Procedural Law (EiPro). EiPro is a project developed at the De-partment of International Law and Dispute Resolution of the Max Planck Institute Luxem-bourg (MPI), under the direction of Professor Hélène Ruiz Fabri.

1. ScopeThe project stems from the conviction that a detailed and systematic exploration of in-ternational procedural law and practice will yield crucial insights in the highly complex workings of today’s international relations. Therefore, going beyond reflecting the state of the art of legal and interdisciplinary research on international procedure, EiPro also has the ambition of promoting cutting-edge research on what remains on the whole an under-explored realm of international practice.

The scope of EiPro reflects a broad notion of procedure embracing decision-making by in-ternational organs in general, including political and administrative bodies whose purpose is not that of adjudicating or otherwise settling a dispute or a legal issue. However, in the first three years of its life cycle (2017-2020) the project will focus on dispute settlement and adjudication, so as to set adjudicative means of dispute settlement at its core. Non-adju-dicative modes of dispute settlement, like negotiation, mediation and conciliation, will be fully integrated in the project in 2018, whereas political and administrative procedures will be brought into the encyclopedic picture by the end of 2019.

The diagram situates EiPro’s current scope within the wider subject of international proce-dure that sets the outer boundary of the project. It should be stressed that EiPro adopts a comprehensive notion of adjudication, including non-binding (e.g., compliance and com-

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munication procedures) and non-contentious (e.g., advisory opinions) forms of it. Adjudica-tion is accordingly defined as the interpretation and application of a pre-existing interna-tionally relevant set of rules, regardless of whether or not the rules themselves, or the ad-judicative act based thereon, are legally binding. The purpose of this definition is to break free from a formal, source-based conception of the international legal space. For the pur-poses of the encyclopedic project, that space would then embrace, alongside public in-ternational law institutions, domestic and transnational ones, from hybrid criminal courts and tribunals to the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), that is, all those institutions whose essential purpose is to lay down or apply rules of obvious international relevance.

2. MethodIn the last 25 years the international legal space has reached, especially through the es-tablishment of many new international courts and tribunals and others adjudicative bodies, unprecedented levels of complexity and diversity. Time is ripe, then, for undertaking a rig-orous and systematic application of the comparative method of analysis to the field of in-ternational adjudication. The recourse to the analytic toolbox of comparative law is an im-portant feature of EiPro and finds expression in its five-dimensional typology of entries, which, as explained in section 2, includes two types of comparative entries.

EiPro aims at making available detailed accounts of key events, concepts and institutions, original research, rich historical contextualization, in-depth legal analyses, and critical as-sessments of existing practices and doctrines, not least through the integration of insights coming from other disciplines, like history, philosophy, sociology, international relations theory, anthropology, psychology and semiotics.

The Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law (MPEPIL) remains an important point of reference in the development EiPro, and a touchstone as far as style and quality are concerned. Since MPEPIL potentially addresses every aspect of public international law, including procedural ones, the two encyclopedic bodies overlap to a certain extent. While MPEPIL’s scope is clearly much wider than EiPro’s, the latter intends to go more into detail as far as procedure is concerned, thereby reducing the overlapping area to a mini-mum. MPEPIL and EiPro will operate as distinct and mutually reinforcing sections of the Oxford Public International Law (OPIL) portal. Although each Encyclopedia will have its own webpage, OPIL’s users will be able to access them simultaneously through a single search engine.

3. Expected AudiencesEiPro’s design, method and style will make it appealing to a wide audience. EiPro’s read-ership would include academics and practitioners working in any subfield of public in-ternational law and interested in the activities of international courts or tribunals. The fact the EiPro will feature many entries on specific topics in the field of procedural law, often dealt with in a comparative key, should make it particularly useful for practitioners, includ-

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ing transnational and global lawyers. Last but not least, EiPro aims to position itself as a reference work, and a first port of call, for undergraduate, graduate, and PhD students in-terested in international procedural law and public international law more generally.

4. StructureEiPro features a provisional list of more than 1,000 encyclopedic articles on international adjudication classified according to their subject-matter and their form. Each entry belong to one of the following thematic clusters:

The clusters were initially conceived as a research tool. Their purpose was to make the effort of identifying potential encyclopedic entries as focused and systematic as possible at the preparatory stage of the project. This general taxonomy was eventually maintained and progressively fine-tuned. It now features more that 50 sub-clusters.

As already stated, the encyclopedic entries are organised not only by subject-matter but also by form. Each of them falls within one of five methodological categories:

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1. INSTITUTIONS 8. DECISION-MAKING2. PROCEDURES 9. REVIEW3. COMPOSITION 10. ENFORCEMENT4. PARTICIPATION 11. COOPERATION5. ORGANISATION OF PROCEEDINGS 12. ETHICS6. JURISDICTION 13. THEORY7. EVIDENCE 14. HISTORY


System-specific entries analyse a specific issue, or set of issues, as they arise within a single international legal system or procedure. For instance, the entry ‘Appointment of judges (Court of Justice of the European Union)’ will provide a detailed account and a criti-cal appraisal of the procedure for such appointment, including its historical, socio-political and statistical aspects.System entries are wider in scope for they deal with an institution or procedure in their en-tirety, not with a single issue. For instance, the entry ‘Indonesian Ad Hoc Human Rights Court’ will feature a historical and political account of the establishment of the Court, a de-tailed analysis of relevant key texts and case law with a focus on procedural questions, and an overall assessment of the Court’s performance, accompanied by a reflection on the causes of its success or failure.

Family-specific comparative entries analyse a specific issue in a comparative key, keeping the comparison within the bounds of a family of legal systems when such a restriction ap-pears to be methodologically ap-propriate or heuristically advanta-geous. For instance, the entry ‘Admissibility (Human rights bod-ies)’ will provide a detailed and crit-ical comparative account of how those bodies deal with questions of admissibility of complaints brought before them, taking as a starting point a notion of human rights bodies that would encom-pass every international organ that, however designated, is com-petent to hear individual or inter-State complaints but is not autho-rized to adopt binding decisions. A family-specific comparative entry on international criminal courts and tribunals — to give another exam-ple — would include the In-ternational Criminal Court, the Ad Hoc International Criminal Tribunals for the Former Yu-goslavia and Rwanda, the Special Court for Sierra Leone, the Special Tribunal for Lebanon, the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, the International Crimes Tribunal in Bangladesh, the Extraordinary African Chambers in the Senegalese Courts, the

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1. SYSTEM-SPECIFIC2. SYSTEM3. COMPARATIVE (FAMILY OF SYSTEMS)4. COMPARATIVE (GENERAL)5. THEORETICAL


Special Panels for Serious Crimes in the Dili District Court (East Timor), the Regulation 64 Panels established by UMMIK, the Kosovo Relocated Specialist Judicial Institution, and the Iraqi Special Tribunal.

By contrast, general comparative entries have to be in principle all-encompassing. At least the following forums should fall within their purview: the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court, the ad hoc international criminal courts and tribunals, the In-ternational Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the World Trade Organization’s dispute settle-ment system, the regional human rights courts, the courts of major regional economic in-tegration organisations, human rights bodies of a universal character, as well and inter-State and investor-State arbitration. By assigning the priority to system and system-specif-ic entries bearing on the same subject, the organisation of EiPro’s production process will ease up the comparative effort required by general comparative entries.

Theoretical entries are sites of conceptual clarification, philosophical inquiry, and gateways to interdisciplinary explorations. In setting them in a separate category, we did not lose sight of the fact that theory is pervasive and that distinguishing a theoretical topic from one that lends itself to a general comparative treatment may be difficult. In many encyclopedic entries comparison and theorising will go hand in hand.

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5. Scientific Advisory Board and In-House TeamOver 50 top-level academics and practitioners, including international judges and arbitra-tors, accepted to be members of the EiPro’s Scientific Advisory Board (SAB). The SAB plays an important role in the identification of the topics suitable for inclusion in the Ency-clopedia, the selection of authors, and the peer-review process. Two members of the in-house team – the General Editor and the Chief Scientific Advisor – are also members of the SAB.

The EiPro in-house team comprises about 10 people. The Chief Scientific Advisor assists the General Editor in the conception and planning of the Encyclopedia. The Project Man-ager, aided by researchers, a Managing Editor, and a small ICT team attends to and over-sees the implementation of the project. She is also the main interlocutor of the IT Ap-plications Manager. A team of 20 Research Fellows and Senior Research Fellows, all members of the Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution of the MPI Lux-embourg, carries out a preliminary review of the consistency of the entries with EiPro sub-stantive and formal requirements and ensures communication with the authors and the members of the SAB acting as peer reviewers. Finally, freelance proof-readers will make sure that each EiPro’s entry is linguistically and stylistically polished to comply with the quality requirements.

6. Organisation and TimelineEiPro avails itself of advanced IT tools. A tailor-made collaborative work online platform helped considerably in teasing out the structure and contents of EiPro. It will be used it in the years to come to analyse the living body of the Encyclopedia and steer its evolution. Editorial Manager, a could-based manuscript submission and peer-review tracking system provided by Aries, will help the EiPro team in streamlining the implementation phase by combining automation with customised support for authors.

Authors are given access to the EiPro Database, where more than 3000 documents, in-cluding treaties containing jurisdictional clauses, statutes, rules of procedure, codes of conduct, etc., are made readily available.

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It is estimated that the editorial process will take on average 12 months, from the day on which the invitation to contribute an entry is accepted to the production of a peer-reviewed article ready for publication. The peer-review stage will include a preliminary assessment by an associate editor and a full-blown review by two members of the SAB, followed by a final in-house quality check by the General Editor. The formal review stage includes an ed-itorial check-up and the proofreading of the entry.

We predict that by the end of March 2018 at least 150 entries will be ready for transmis-sion to the publisher – 300 in October 2018 – and that the full Encyclopedia, featuring at least 1,000 articles, will be available by February 2022.

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