Public International Law

The Europa-Institut, as the editor, is the second eldest institution of its kind in Europe. More than 5.000 students from all over the world have been educated in the fields of European and International Law at the Europa-Institut since its foundation in 1951. Each year students from over 30 countries come to the one-year postgraduate master’s programme “European and International Law” to study the legal, political, economic and cultural foundations of the European Union. The programme is characterized by five special study units – European Integration, European Economic Law, Foreign Trade and Investment, International Dispute Resolution and European Protection of Human Rights. It provides students with great freedom of choice regarding the courses they wish to attend and offers a high degree of specialization. The programme can be completed entirely in English, entirely in German or in a combination of these and results in the award of the title Master of Laws (LL.M.) to its successful participants. We decided to assemble our own collection series compiling key documents for each respective field of our LL.M. programme after recognizing that existing collections do not fulfil the specific requirements necessary for the successful performance of our students. In attempting to fill the gap we have published five volumes so far – “International Dispute Resolution” as volume 1, “European Law” as volume 2, “International and European Trade Law” as volume 3, “Public International Law” as volume 4 and “International Human Rights Law” as volume 5. Volume 4 includes a collection of public international law documents that has been compiled with the consideration to present a comprehensive overview of the hard and soft international rules and principles of general application that regulate the conduct of States and International Organizations. The volume comprises the essential (mostly universal, some European) law-making treaties which try to promote world peace and justice through law. A number of particularly important Resolutions of the UN General Assembly and documents produced by the International Law Commission are also included. We have decided to concentrate on the general documents and to abstain from covering specific areas that are the subject of the other volumes or are less frequently used in academic teaching and research.