Introduction
Espionage is clandestine information-gathering by or on behalf of a state. It is usually distinguished from covert action, which aims not merely to collect information but to shape outcomes while obscuring the sponsor’s role.[1] Yet the law governing inter-state relations has never drawn a stable line between “tolerated” intelligence activity and informational intrusion that counts as a legally cognisable injury.[2] This essay focuses on cyber espionage: covert access to, monitoring of, or exfiltration from networked systems and digital infrastructure.[3] The stakes are conceptual as well as practical. When intrusion targets the informational conditions of self-government, it unsettles familiar understandings of sovereignty and the mechanics of coercion.[4]
A useful entry point is Timor-Leste v Australia. Timor-Leste sought provisional measures (urgent interim orders) after Australia seized and detained confidential legal materials. Allegations that Australian intelligence had earlier intercepted Timor-Leste’s negotiations formed the background, but they were not the direct subject of the ICJ’s provisional measures order.[5] No territorial incursion occurred, and no infrastructure was physically impaired. Yet interference with a state’s confidential legal and negotiating communications could still distort the terms on which it deliberates and bargains.[6]This episode illustrates the broader problem. Informational intrusion can impair sovereign decision-making even when it falls short of force, physical damage, or overt commands.[7]
The central claim of this essay is that some forms of modern cyber espionage produce “epistemic coercion” by shaping the informational setting in which public decisions are made. The mechanism is indirect. It does not issue commands. It influences what officials can confidently know, dispute, and treat as feasible inside institutions. By “epistemic coercion,” I mean a loss of meaningful policy choice caused by manipulating the informational environment in which preferences and options are formed, through persistent access to internal communications that allows an actor to anticipate, narrow, or redirect options before they are formally considered.[8] The condition that enables this is a durable asymmetry of visibility: one state can systematically map and predict another state’s internal deliberations while remaining largely opaque itself.[9]
The normative claim that follows is modest. If sovereignty protects a state’s capacity to govern itself, doctrine should take seriously the informational conditions that make self-government possible. I call that capacity “epistemic autonomy,” meaning the ability of public institutions to form, contest, and act on judgments without external actors quietly shaping the informational environment in which decisions are prepared.[10]
The argument proceeds in four steps. First, it explains how cyber espionage has shifted from episodic theft to persistent, infrastructural access.[11] Second, it sketches four recurring modalities of epistemic coercion. Third, it shows why existing doctrines of sovereignty, non-intervention, attribution, and due diligence often undercount anticipatory and ambient harms.[12] Finally, it proposes calibrated responses. These include treating epistemic autonomy as a dimension of sovereignty and using a threshold inquiry of “cognitive displacement” to identify when intelligence practices begin to distort institutional judgment rather than merely observe it.[13] By “cognitive displacement,” I mean the point at which informational intrusion starts to substitute for an institution’s own processes of assessment and decision.[14]
From Secrets to Systems
Traditional espionage typically pilfered discrete secrets. It was episodic and transactional.[15] Modern cyber espionage is infrastructural. It involves persistent footholds within government decision-making systems, continuous monitoring of internal communications, and the modelling of organisational behaviour at scale.[16] A persistent foothold means that the intruder remains inside the network over time rather than stealing one file and leaving.[17] For example, an attacker might maintain access to a ministry’s email server or document-management system for weeks or months, watching drafts circulate and tracking which offices are driving changes. These practices aim not merely to discover what a government intends, but to anticipate the conditions in which intention is formed.[18]
This becomes especially powerful when the intruder can analyse communications and metadata at scale. Captured traffic can reveal who influences whom, which arguments are gaining traction, and where internal “red lines” are likely to sit before a position is finalised.[19] The object of influence is upstream of policy articulation: the salience of facts, the sequencing of options, the perceived feasibility of alternatives, and the internal distribution of confidence.[20] Coercion in this register operates without commands. What is constrained is not the visible choice at the end of a decision tree, but the background conditions that make some options seem plausible and others effectively unavailable.[21]
This dynamic appears in four recurring modalities.[22]
Strategic disorientation floods attention and disrupts verification. One example is a timed leak of genuine documents released in batches large enough to swamp verification capacity and redirect institutional time toward reactive explanation.[23] The practice does not depend on falsity. It relies on manipulating timing and attention, and therefore the conditions under which truth is assessed.[24]
Cognitive manipulation operates more quietly. It exploits sustained access to internal drafts and communications to shape how options are framed and narrowed before a formal decision is taken.[25] If an intruder can read draft options and internal emails, they can anticipate which lines of argument are gaining support and use that knowledge to steer debate indirectly, for example by timing disclosures of sensitive material or targeting pressure at officials who are shaping the draft.[26] The resulting shifts can appear endogenous because the intervention occurs before the visible decision point.[27]
A third modality is disabling legal voice. It captures a predictable chilling effect. When officials expect surveillance or disclosure, they self-censor. They avoid certain lawful arguments, positions, or contacts because they assume they are being watched and might later be embarrassed, discredited, or punished.[28] Lawyers and diplomats shade claims they would otherwise advance, not because doctrine disallows them, but because the perceived cost of advocacy rises.[29]
A fourth modality is informational dependency. It arises when the systems used to interpret information become exposed, mirrored, or predictable to an adversary. A concrete illustration is reliance on core data systems or platforms that an adversary can continuously access or anticipate, making it difficult for the target state to know whether its assessments are independent or already mapped and countered.[30] In such conditions a state may appear to retain agency while its autonomy is substantively diminished.[31]
Why Doctrine Misses What Matters
International law’s difficulty is not a lack of legal vocabulary. It is that the law of inter-state relations is most comfortable with visible events. It is built to recognise force, disruption, and loss of integrity more readily than ambient, cumulative, and delayed harms.[32]
Ambient harm arises when the informational environment itself is altered, for example by a standing expectation of surveillance that changes how internal deliberation is conducted.[33] Cumulative harm arises when small intrusions or disclosures add up over time. Repeated compromises of email accounts, draft documents, or scheduling systems may each look manageable in isolation, but together they can erode institutional trust and narrow perceived options.[34] Delayed harm captures the lag between intrusion and visible effect. A network quietly accessed for months may produce no single dramatic incident, yet still reshape bargaining positions, internal trust, and perceived options long before any public decision point.[35]
The law governing the resort to force (jus ad bellum) centres kinetic and destructive effects.[36] Non-intervention doctrine tends to frame coercion as pressure on outcomes, or threats of such pressure.[37] Cyber norms influenced by the Tallinn process emphasise the availability, integrity, and functionality of systems, meaning whether systems keep running, remain unaltered, and stay usable. None of these frameworks are mistaken. They are incomplete in an environment where the dominant harms are anticipatory and structural.[38] By the time an outcome is overtly constrained, the work of influence may already have been done through methods that leave no single, disruptive signature.[39]
Sovereignty is commonly conceptualised as a state’s authority over its territory and its capacity to run its own public institutions.[40] Those strands remain salient. Yet the most consequential intrusions now target the informational foundations of self-government: access to and control over the processes by which states come to know, evaluate, and decide.[41] If sovereignty and independence are treated as a baseline freedom from external control,[42] the question becomes whether sustained informational intrusion can itself function as external control even without crossing a border or breaking a system.[43]
In practice, this can include sustained access to internal email, drafting systems, or negotiating files that allows an outside actor to anticipate which options are emerging and quietly shape the conditions under which officials choose among them.[44] Classic authorities presuppose an internally competent legal subject, and that presupposition is strained if the subject’s decision-making process is persistently infiltrated, continuously monitored, and used to predict how choices will be made.[45] If an attacker can watch draft positions evolve over weeks, identify which advisers reliably change outcomes, and anticipate internal “red lines,” the state’s eventual position may still look voluntary while having been steered in advance.[46] That is why purely territorial or functionality-based accounts of sovereignty no longer capture the whole problem.[47]
The doctrinal debate among states over whether sovereignty in cyberspace operates as a primary rule of conduct or as a general principle should not obscure the underlying proposition.[48] At a minimum, sovereignty presupposes space for independent institutional judgment.[49] If outsiders can shape what officials know, what they can safely argue, and which options appear feasible, public decisions may no longer reflect genuine, independent assessment.[50]
Non-intervention doctrine exhibits a parallel limitation. The rule bars a state from coercively interfering in matters another state is entitled to decide freely.[51] If coercion is understood as direct pressure on the choice set or outcome, anticipatory interventions that shape how officials assess options before a decision is taken can appear non-coercive.[52]The aim is not to collapse cross-border persuasion into illegality. International politics relies on signalling, advocacy, and even sharply competitive influence. The question is whether sustained unauthorised access to internal decision systems, combined with predictive insight into how choices are forming, can amount to coercion in a different register.[53] For example, if an operator can continuously read draft positions and internal emails, it can time disclosures, target pressure, or pre-empt negotiation moves in ways that narrow what officials can plausibly argue or adopt while the decision is still in formation.[54] Where operations reliably maintain this kind of upstream leverage over internal assessment, the line between persuasion and coercion starts to blur. The target may still “choose,” but under informational conditions engineered to steer judgment in advance.[55]
Attribution and due diligence falter for related reasons. Attribution asks a simple question with a hard answer: can the operation be legally linked to a state?[56] Due diligence asks another: did a state fail to take reasonable steps to prevent its territory, infrastructure, or networks from being used for harmful operations against other states?[57] Both doctrines incorporate mental elements such as knowledge, foreseeability, and reasonableness, but they work best when the facts resemble a bounded incident with a clear actor and an identifiable chain of control.[58] Epistemic coercion instead tends to appear as many small, overlapping moves spread across time and across multiple systems and actors, including contractors, service providers, or intermediaries. That structure is not incidental. It makes legal proof harder while influence accumulates.[59] Effective control and similar tests have limited traction where the harm is cumulative and the operation is designed to avoid discrete thresholds that would trigger legal consequence.[60] In short, the law looks for a clean event. The practice is built to look like noise.[61]
Human rights law faces a related but distinct problem. The injuries often register at the level of institutions rather than individuals: chilled deliberation, narrowed discourse, and degraded bureaucratic memory.[62] These are real constraints on democratic governance, but they are harder to plead and prove as discrete, one-off rights violations.[63]Extraterritoriality compounds the problem by introducing jurisdictional hesitation precisely where the effects of epistemic interventions are transboundary by design.[64] If responsibility is uncertain and jurisdiction is contested, states often hesitate to characterise the conduct as unlawful, invoke responsibility, or take public legal positions.[65] The cumulative effect can be permissive silence, which may function over time as a form of de facto permission by default.[66]
Toward a Law of Epistemic Autonomy
The corrective is modest in concept but legally significant. Sovereignty should be understood to include epistemic autonomy, meaning the ability of a state’s public institutions to form and contest legal and policy judgments without outsiders secretly accessing, steering, or distorting the information and systems those judgments depend on.[67] This is not a rebranding of privacy. Privacy rules primarily protect individual interests against surveillance and intrusion. Epistemic autonomy protects the integrity of institutional decision-making and a state’s capacity to own its reasons in public.[68] That matters because persuasion and consent have legal meaning only if the reasons offered publicly are not quietly shaped elsewhere.[69] Classical accounts of sovereignty presupposed a legal subject capable of forming and defending its own judgment.[70] In contemporary decision environments, that competence also requires sufficient deliberative insulation to ensure that public reasons are not quietly rewritten during internal deliberation.[71]
That conceptual claim must also be usable. A threshold inquiry of “cognitive displacement” offers one way to make it operational. It supports a rebuttable inference that epistemic coercion is a plausible legal characterisation when three indicators converge. First, there is prolonged, one-sided access to internal decision systems. Second, that access is used to steer how internal legal reasoning develops, whether through timed disclosures, analysis of drafts at scale, deliberate misdirection, or similar upstream techniques. Third, the affected state’s public legal or policy position shows signs of constraint, such as abrupt narrowing of arguments, unexplained shifts in justification, or persistent inconsistency with prior practice. This is an evidentiary aid, not a new standalone rule and not an automatic reversal of the burden of proof.Its function is to support existing legal claims, for example under sovereignty or non-intervention, in settings where concealment and slow accumulation are part of the technique of harm.[72]
The inquiry does not demand smoking-gun confessions. It aligns proof with the nature of the harm. Where concealment and latency are the operative techniques, the law must permit convergent indicators to substitute for event-centric triggers. Some elements will remain contestable, especially what counts as “constraint” in a public position, but the inquiry can be grounded in concrete materials. These include intrusion reports and access logs, the timing of access windows alongside shifts in legal argument, and, where lawfully available, internal drafts or patterns in internal advice showing systematic narrowing of options during the period of intrusion.
This is not unprecedented in structure. Other areas of law already recognise that cumulative and indirect harms may require patterned evidence rather than a single decisive incident. The point here is similar: where secrecy and latency are part of the technique, legal assessment should allow convergent indicators to carry evidentiary weight even when no single moment of harm is easy to isolate.[73]
On that basis, two adjustments follow. First, non-intervention’s account of coercion should be refined to include sustained interference with a state’s ability to form policy and legal judgment within its own institutions, alongside pressure on outcomes. This is the direct doctrinal payoff of the epistemic autonomy claim. When an outside actor quietly shapes what officials can know, argue, and treat as feasible, the interference can operate as coercion even if no explicit demand is made. The criterion is whether the operation narrows options over time, not whether it produces a single moment of compulsion. Operations that maintain sustained, one-sided insight into internal deliberation can therefore encroach upon the domaine réservé, meaning matters a state is entitled to decide freely under international law.[74]
Second, the General Assembly should be encouraged to seek an ICJ advisory opinion on whether persistent cyber operations that impair deliberative autonomy fall within the scope of unlawful intervention. Such an opinion could clarify the legal vocabulary available to states, including whether and when sustained intrusion into internal deliberation can qualify as coercive intervention, and what indicators are relevant when the conduct is designed to be covert and cumulative. An advisory posture avoids the evidentiary and security complexities of a contentious case, clarifies baseline concepts for norm-setting fora, and gives jurists a firmer conceptual footing.[75] These two moves do not solve every evidentiary problem. But they would give courts, advisers, and states a firmer basis for recognising when cyber intrusion no longer merely observes institutional judgment, but starts to displace it.
Counter Arguments and Justifications
Three recurring objections merit brief engagement: ubiquity, proof, and overbreadth.[76]
First, critics may say that informational advantage is ubiquitous in international relations, so treating it as legally salient risks describing everything and explaining nothing. That is descriptively accurate, but normatively incomplete. International law has long acknowledged structural inequalities when they compromise the possibility of agency, whether in decolonization, anti-discrimination, or climate regimes.[77] What matters here is not asymmetry as such, but asymmetry that penetrates the informational conditions of sovereign judgment.[78] Recognising it does not commit the law to equalise capabilities. It commits the law to securing minimum conditions under which reasons can be authored rather than supplied.[79]
Second, skeptics may worry about proof. Epistemic harms can be gradual, ambient, and cumulative, and the category may appear too elastic. The proposed threshold mitigates this risk by requiring convergence of capacity, mechanism, and effect, assessed through rebuttable presumptions and disciplined inference rather than categorical declarations.[80]
Third, critics may worry about overbreadth. If “epistemic coercion” is defined too widely, it could cast ordinary intelligence collection as unlawful. The answer is a functional distinction between intelligence that informs decision-making and intelligence that displaces it.[81] Intelligence that informs supports policy formation without steering internal reasoning. Intelligence that displaces involves sustained, privileged, one-sided access oriented to shaping how institutional judgment develops.[82] A state that reads public statements, tracks troop movements, or uses open-source intelligence is informing its policy. By contrast, a state that maintains covert access to another government’s internal drafts and legal advice over time, and uses that access to time leaks, target pressure, or pre-empt negotiation positions, is no longer merely observing.[83] It is steering the conditions under which choices are formed. The distinction preserves necessary statecraft while defending the basic conditions of independent judgment and genuine agency.[84]
These objections do not eliminate the need for legal development. They clarify its proper scope. The aim is not to condemn intelligence collection in general, but to identify the narrower category of operations in which sustained access and predictive leverage begin to displace independent institutional judgment. That is why the proposals advanced above remain modest. They seek to refine existing doctrine and evidentiary practice, not to create an entirely new regime for espionage.
Conclusion
The broader claim is straightforward. International law presupposes actors capable of forming and defending reasons of their own.[85] Epistemic coercion leaves institutional forms intact while substituting the content of judgment. A legal order that insists on visible harm as the trigger for legal recognition risks mistaking performance for consent and replication for sovereignty.[86] This essay uses “epistemic coercion” primarily to describe that mechanism, and then as a lens for refining existing doctrines. Depending on the facts, sustained cyber intrusion that distorts internal deliberation can support claims under sovereignty and non-intervention, and it can inform more realistic evidentiary inferences for attribution and due diligence.[87]
Reframing sovereignty to include epistemic autonomy is not a maximalist project. Nor is using cognitive displacement as a disciplined threshold inquiry. Both are modest attempts to preserve the conditions under which law can still mediate power through reasons rather than technique alone. It is to make familiar rules workable when influence operates through quiet access to drafts, advice, and decision systems rather than through open demands or physical disruption.[88] The central point is not that all cyber espionage is unlawful. It is that some cyber espionage no longer merely observes state decision-making. It quietly reorganises the informational conditions under which states deliberate, justify, and choose. International law should be able to name that harm with greater clarity than it does now.
[1] Darien Pun, ‘Rethinking Espionage in the Modern Era’ (2017) 18 Chicago Journal of International Law 353.
[2] ibid.
[3] Jon Lindsay, ‘Cyber Espionage’ The Oxford Handbook of Cyber Security (Oxford University Press 2021). See also; Siena Anstis, ‘Regulating Transnational Dissident Cyber Espionage’ (2024) 73 International & Comparative Law Quarterly 259.
[4] Island of Palmas (or Miangas) (The Netherlands / The United States of America) (Arbitration); W Michael Reisman, ‘Coercion and Self-Determination: Construing Charter Article 2 (4)’ (1984) 78 American Journal of International Law 642.
[5] Questions relating to the Seizure and Detention of Certain Documents and Data (Timor-Leste v Australia) (ICJ).
[6] Bettauer (n 5).
[7] Reisman (n 4).
[8] Sophia Dandelet, ‘Epistemic Coercison’ (2021) 131 Ethics 489; Stephen Turner, ‘Epistemic Coercion’ (2024) 61 Epistemology & Philosophy Science 21.
[9] Santos, Boaventura de Sousa, ‘Epistemologies of the South and the Future’ (2016) 1 From the European South: A Transdisciplinary Journal of Postcolonial Humanities 17; Boaventura de Sousa Santos, ‘Toward a New Legal Common Sense’; José Medina, ‘Group Agential Epistemic Injustice: Epistemic Disempowerment and Critical Defanging of Group Epistemic Agency’ (2022) 32 Philosophical Issues 320.
[10] Medina (n 9).
[11] Anstis (n 3); Lindsay (n 3).
[12] Marco Roscini, Cyber Operations and the Use of Force in International Law (Oxford University Press, USA 2014); Michael N Schmitt, Tallinn Manual 2.0 on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations (Cambridge University Press 2017); Corfu Channel (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v Albania) [1949] ICJ Rep 4 (ICJ).
[13] Prosper Weil, ‘Towards Relative Normativity in International Law?’ (1983) 77 American Journal of International Law 413.
[14] Medina (n 9).
[15] Lindsay (n 3); Pun (n 1).
[16] Lindsay (n 3); Asbjørn Thranov, ‘Cyber Espionage: How the Competition for Intelligence Challenges International Law’ (Danish Institute for International Studies 2023); Anstis (n 3).
[17] Lindsay (n 3); Thranov (n 16); Ronald J Deibert, Black Code: Surveillance, Privacy, and the Dark Side of the Internet (Signal 2013).
[18] David Omand, Securing the State (Oxford University Press 2015).
[19] Thranov (n 16); Medina (n 9).
[20] Johan Galtung, ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’ (1969) 6 Journal of Peace Research 167; Pierre Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and Symbolic Power’ (1989) 7 Sociological Theory 14.
[21] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v United States of America), Merits, Judgment [1986] ICJ Rep 14 (International Court of Justice); Schmitt (n 12) rule 66 and commentary.
[22] Anstis (n 3); Thibault Moulin, ‘Cyber Espionage: A Legal Analysis’ (Communauté Université Grenoble Alpes 2018); Medina (n 9); Galtung (n 20); Bourdieu (n 20).
[23] Joseph S Nye, The Future of Power (Public Affairs 2011).
[24] Nye (n 23); Bourdieu (n 20).
[25] Medina (n 9); Lindsay (n 3); Deibert (n 17).
[26] Deibert (n 17); Schmitt (n 12).
[27] Medina (n 9).
[28] Case of Roman Zakharov V Russia (ECtHR); Case of Liberty and Others V the United Kingdom (ECtHR).
[29] Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (n 9); Robert M Cover, ‘Foreword: Nomos and Narrative’ (1983) 97 Harv L Rev 4.
[30] Anstis (n 3); Deibert (n 17).
[31]Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (n 9).
[32] Koskenniemi (n 18).
[33] Case of Roman Zakharov V. Russia (n 28); Case of Big Brother Watch and Others v the United Kingdom (ECtHR).
[34] Rio Declaration on Environment and Development 1992; Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v Uruguay) (ICJ).
[35] Trail Smelter Case (United States, Canada) (Trail Smelter Case Arbitral Tribunal); Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v. Uruguay)(n 34).
[36] Roscini (n 12).
[37] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21).
[38] Schmitt (n 12); Moulin (n 22).
[39] Kristen E Eichensehr, ‘Sovereignty and Cyber Attacks’ (2017) 95 Texas Law Review 471, 497–503.
[40] Island of Palmas (or Miangas) (The Netherlands / The United States of America) (n 4).
[41] Medina (n 9); Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (n 9).
[42] Koskenniemi (n 18); Cover (n 29).
[43] The Case of the SS Lotus (France v Turkey).
[44] Gary P Corn, ‘Covert Deception, Strategic Fraud, and International Law’ (2015) 48 Vanderbilt Journal of Transnational Law 1035, 1071–78.
[45] Island of Palmas (or Miangas) (The Netherlands / The United States of America) (n 4); The Case of the S.S. Lotus (France v Turkey) (n 43); Medina (n 9).
[46] Corn (n 44); Roscini (n 12).
[47] International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights 1966 Arts 19–20; Human Rights Committee, ‘General Comment No.34 on Article 19: Freedoms of Opinion and Expression’; Fake News and Disinformation: Handbook for Journalism Education and Training (UNESCO 2018).
[48] Ministère des Armées, ‘Droit International Appliqué Aux Opérations Dans Le Cyberespace’; Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs, ‘Letter to the Parliament on the International Legal Order in Cyberspace’ (2019).
[49] Island of Palmas (or Miangas) (The Netherlands / The United States of America) (n 4).
[50] Medina (n 9); Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (n 9); Eichensehr (n 39).
[51] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21); Declaration on the Inadmissibility of Intervention in the Domestic Affairs of States and the Protection of Their Independence and Sovereignty 1965 (A/RES/2131(XX)); Declaration on Principles of International Law Concerning Friendly Relations and Cooperation Among States in Accordance with the Charter of the United Nations 1971 (A/RES/2625(XXV)).
[52] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21).
[53] Reisman (n 4); Schmitt (n 12).
[54] Corn (n 44); Reisman (n 4).
[55] Medina (n 9); Eichensehr (n 39).
[56] ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts’; Nicholas Tsagourias and Michael Farrell, ‘Cyber Attribution: Technical and Legal Approaches and Challenges’ (2020) 31 European Journal of International Law 941; Michael N Schmitt and Liis Vihul, ‘Proxy Wars in Cyberspace: The Evolving International Law of Attribution’ (2014) 1 Fletcher Sec Rev 53.
[57] Corfu Channel (United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. Albania) (n 12); Schmitt (n 12).
[58] ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts’ (n 56) arts 11 and 16.
[59] Moulin (n 22).
[60] ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts’ (n 56); Schmitt and Vihul (n 56).
[61] Orford (n 32); Koskenniemi (n 18).
[62] Case of Roman Zakharov V. Russia (n 28); Case of Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom (n 33).
[63] Human Rights Committee (n 47); Fake News and Disinformation: Handbook for Journalism Education and Training (n 47).
[64] Data Protection Commissioner v Facebook Ireland Limited and Maximillian Schrems (ECJ); Case of Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom (n 33).
[65] Thranov (n 16).
[66] Thranov (n 16); The Case of the S.S. Lotus (France v Turkey) (n 43).
[67] Eichensehr (n 39).
[68] Case of Roman Zakharov V. Russia (n 28); see also Case of Big Brother Watch and Others v. the United Kingdom (n 33).
[69] Cover (n 29).
[70] Koskenniemi (n 18).
[71] Deibert (n 17).
[72] See Orford (n 32); see also Schmitt (n 12).
[73] Sands (n 34) 217–25; see also Pulp Mills on the River Uruguay (Argentina v. Uruguay) (n 34) 187–94; and Trail Smelter Case (United States, Canada) (n 35).
[74] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21) para 205; see also Schmitt (n 12).
[75] See Advisory Opinion on the Legality of the Threat of Use of Nuclear Weapons (1996) 1996 226 (ICJ); see also Advisory Opinion on Legal Consequences of the Construction of a Wall in the Occupied Palestinian Territory (2004) 2004 ICJ Rep 136.
[76] Orford (n 32).
[77] International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination 1965.
[78] Eichensehr (n 39) 497–503; Moulin (n 22).
[79] Cover (n 29); Santos, Boaventura de Sousa (n 9).
[80] Moulin (n 22).
[81] Schmitt (n 12); Moulin (n 22).
[82] Schmitt (n 12); Roscini (n 12).
[83] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21) para 205; see also Friendly Relations Declaration.
[84] Eichensehr (n 39).
[85] Kuo (n 27).
[86] ibid.
[87] Military and Paramilitary Activities in and Against Nicaragua (Nicaragua v. United States of America), Merits, Judgment (n 21) para 205.
[88] ‘Draft Articles on Responsibility of States for Internationally Wrongful Acts’ (n 56) arts 4–11; and Schmitt (n 12) commentary.
Janakan Muthukumar
Ph.D. in Law and Legal Studies, Carleton University