Abstract

The international legal order today is characterised by increasing informalisation. On the one hand, the instrument of the multilateral international treaty has lost importance globally as a means of legally shaping political relations. On the other hand, nonbinding international agreements and other informal instruments are on the rise. This also raises fundamental questions for national legal systems. At the same time, despite a growing consensus on the phenomenon, there is a lack of clarity about its exact scope and forms. For example, the extent to which the Federal Republic of Germany makes use of informal instruments in its external relations, and in which areas, has not yet been comprehensively investigated. The project therefore, firstly, aims at improving the empirical understanding of the role of informalisation in German international law practice through archival work and semi-structured interviews with practitioners. Second, against the background of these empirical findings, the effects of informalisation on central regulatory goals and concepts of the rules and procedures that govern the interaction of the international and domestic legal orders (‘foreign relations law’) will be analysed. Some of the relevant aspects are the legal effects of non-binding instruments, parliamentary participation, coordination, and access to justice. Thirdly, by drawing on existing foreign relations law doctrines and on comparative law, reform perspectives for the design and use of rules and procedures in dealing with informal international instruments will be identified. The results of this research promise to contribute to a conceptual renewal of the research field of foreign relations law in terms of actors, forms of action and procedures, which includes the significant practice of informalised international relations.

Bio

Thomas Kleinlein holds a Chair of International Law at Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel and is co-director of the Walther Schücking Institute for International Law. Before joining the Kiel law faculty, he held the Chair of Public law, Public International Law, EU Law and Comparative Law at Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena. As a Senior Research Fellow at Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main, he pursued a comparative research project on Federalism and Rights that was funded by a grant of the German Research Foundation. He was a Visiting Researcher at the Yale and University of Michigan Law Schools and a Visiting Professor at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and Université Paris-Panthéon-Assas. In August/September 2024, he is a Visiting Professor at Universitetet i Oslo. He has published on global constitutionalism, sources, the law of treaties, human rights, the (intellectual) history of international law and comparative constitutional law, inter alia in the European Journal of International Law, International and Comparative Law Quarterly and International Journal of Constitutional Law. He co-edited ‘System, Order, and International Law: The Early History of International Legal Thought’ (Oxford University Press 2017, with Stefan Kadelbach and David Roth-Isigkeit) and ‘Encounters between Foreign Relations Law and International Law: Bridges and Boundaries (Cambridge University Press 2021, with Helmut Aust).