The increasing international activities of parliaments raise the question of whether and to what extent parliamentary conduct needs to be assessed against existing international legal standards. In January 2023, the chairs of 19 EU member states parliamentary foreign affairs committees advocated in a ‘Joint Statement’ for a treaty-based special tribunal on the Russian aggression and thereby were among the first political actors to call for such international legal consequences. Parliaments can function as key state actors in denouncing serious human rights violations and international crimes, as exemplified by the case of the Uyghurs in China and the historical case of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. Parliaments participate in diplomatic exchange with other parliaments or executives and work together in inter-parliamentary assemblies, thereby developing into international diplomatic actors. The Inter-Parliamentary Union establishes institutional structures in collaboration with international organizations, such as the UN Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination against Women Treaty Bodies. A practice of parliamentary visits to other states is being established; a noteworthy visit was that of Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the US House of Representatives, to Taiwan in 2022. Such internationally related conduct by parliaments may be more closely linked to international law than so far perceived. Understanding the role of parliament in international law challenges the notion of a purely domestic legal function of parliaments and it contributes to creating a broader discourse on state actor participation in international law.
State responsibility and international law-making serve as legal frameworks to analyze the involvement of parliaments in international law. As so-called secondary law, state responsibility and international law-making offer a perspective on parliament’s position beyond a specific international legal regime. The presentation will outline the thesis’s main findings before focusing on parliamentary contributions to law-making, with a particular attention on the temporal aspect of parliamentary inclusion in treaty-making.
Nathanael van der Beek is a research fellow and PhD candidate in international law, supervised by Prof. Dr. Heike Krieger at Freie Universität Berlin. He studied law at Freie Universität Berlin and Université Paris-Est Créteil and passed his first legal state examination in 2021. His PhD focuses on the inclusion of domestic parliaments in international legal structures. He previously worked as a research fellow at the Berlin Potsdam Research Group “The International Rule of Law – Rise or Decline?” from 2021-2024 and as a student assistant for the Max-Planck-Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law from 2017-2021. Nathanael was a PhD guest researcher at the University of Cambridge and the Graduate Institute in Geneva and interned at the Office of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit in Kigali and the International Law Commission in Geneva.