Call for Papers – What Future for Kosovo?

2006 is the year in which the final status of Kosovo is to be decided. Direct talks have begun between Belgrade and Prishtina to work towards a negotiated settlement covering aspects ranging from the protection of cultural heritage to local government reform which should empower Kosovo-Serb majority municipalities. Independence for the territory, however, seems to be a foregone conclusion.

German Law Journal’s November issue (Vol. 7, No. 11) will focus on a number of international legal issues connected with the final status determination of Kosovo, such as the legal capacity of the Security Council to impose territorial boundaries absent a negotiated settlement, the implications of Kosovo’s independence for the future of the law of self-determination, as well as problems related to the legitimacy of ‘guided sovereignty’.

Some of the issues to be covered thus include:

▪              The legal limits to Security Council powers to determine the borders of a self-determining unit in the absence of horizontal agreement;

▪              The future of self-determination after Kosovo;

▪              The sovereignty debate: did Serbia ‘lose’ sovereignty after its campaigns in 1998 and 1999? Independent statehood or ‘conditional’ sovereignty as a non-state territory?

▪              The legitimacy of international administration;

▪              Legal limits to and legal remedies for actions of an international authority;

▪              Membership of non-state territories in international organizations; access to international financial institutions;

▪              Models of minority protection for Serbs and others within the new borders;

▪              Issues of state succession post-Kosovo; the continuing application of human rights treaties, in particular;

Please send submissions no later than August 1, 2006 - as word document attachments to the editors of the special issue:

Morag Goodwin – morag.goodwin@facburfdr.unimaas.nl

Bernard Knoll – bernhard.knoll@iue.it