Melaku Geboye Desta – författare

EtYIL 2018 comes at a time when multilateralism and its underpinning norms of international law and institutions are under siege. At the same time, in 2018, Africa stood out for upholding multilateralism and international law. From the adoption of the Agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area to the signing of peace agreements that brought to an end two decades of hostilities between Eritrea and Ethiopia, 2018 was indeed a remarkable year for international law in Africa. EtYIL 2018 covers some of these issues, including the Eritrea-Ethiopia Claims Commission decisions on jus ad bellum, jus in bello, evidentiary and procedural matters and the role of arbitration in upholding the international rule of law. Such new developments as the lifting of UN sanctions against Eritrea and the agreements signed between Eritrea and Ethiopia are also covered in this volume. The volume further devotes considerable attention to other legal issues including: the use and misuse of European patent law to the detriment of developing countries’ interests, sharing transboundary resources, production sharing agreements on extractives , evolving rules governing economic relations between Africa and the European Union in the context of Brexit, contract-farming in the African cocoa and chocolate industry, the International Criminal Court and human rights law, and cyber-attacks and the role of international law in tackling them. These chapters, authored by experts from Africa, Asia, Europe and North America not only bring new and diverse voices to the international law discourse; they also contribute to EtYIL’s overarching goal of contributing to the effort to rebalance the narrative of international law.

The second volume of EtYIL brings together a number of articles and other contributions that, collectively, take EtYIL’s original mission of helping rebalance the narrative of international law another step forward. Like the first volume, this book presents scholarly contributions on cutting-edge issues of international law that are of particular interest to Ethiopia and its sub-region, as well as Africa and developing countries more generally. The major issues tackled include the interplay between national and international in the promotion and regulation of foreign direct investment in Ethiopia; the regulatory framework for the exploitation and development of petroleum resources and relevant arbitral jurisprudence in the field; the role of international law in ensuring the equitable sharing of transboundary resources, such as the waters of the River Nile, or in the delimitation of the continental shelf in the region; the efforts to establish the Continental Free Trade Area in Africa and the lessons that can be learnt from prior experiments; Africa’s policy towards the International Criminal Court and the feasibility of alternative means of serving justice in the case of grave crimes; and the UN’s peace-keeping operations in their North-South context. The issues addressed in the various contributions are mostly at the heart of live political, diplomatic and judicial activities today, and as such promise to shape the future of international law in the region and beyond. This volume not only takes a significant step further towards EtYIL’s mission, but also enriches it with fresh insights from perspectives that are not common in international law scholarship to this day.

To this day, nations protect their agricultural trade in a variety of ways: through the limited quantitative restrictions and export quotas permitted under prevailing trade rules, through country-specific derogation in the form of waivers, or even through blatant violations of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT).

In fact, despite the general dramatic decline in tariffs in recent decades, the level of effective protection against the flow of agricultural trade has been steadily rising, almost entirely at the behest of developed countries and to the detriment of developing countries.

This book analyses the current realities and future prospects for global trade in agricultural products. It seeks to explain the real or apparent rationale behind the virtual exemption of agricultural trade from the operation of the law governing international trade in general, focusing on the GATT/WTO system but examining a variety of nation-source policy reasons that generate this crucial counter-current to the general sweep of trade liberalisation.

The issues and topics that arise in the course of the discussion include: