2026 European Rounds of the Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition

Space law emerged in the late 1950s as the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 forced states to confront the legal status of activities beyond national airspace. The UN General Assembly established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (COPUOS) in 1959, which became the principal forum for negotiating the foundational instruments of the field: the 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST), the 1968 Rescue Agreement, the 1972 Liability Convention, the 1975 Registration Convention, and the 1979 Moon Agreement. These treaties establish core principles including the non-appropriation of celestial bodies, state responsibility for national activities (including those of private actors), international liability for damage caused by space objects, and the use of outer space for the benefit of all humankind. The legal regime, designed in an era of two superpower space programs, is now under strain. The proliferation of commercial actors, mega-constellations such as Starlink and OneWeb, planned lunar resource extraction, anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons tests by the United States, Russia, China, and India, and the rapid growth of orbital debris have all exposed gaps in the existing framework. Recent initiatives — including the US-led Artemis Accords (2020), Russia–China cooperation on the International Lunar Research Station, and ongoing COPUOS work on long-term sustainability guidelines and space resources — illustrate competing visions for how the law should evolve. The Manfred Lachs moot problem typically requires delegates to apply these treaties and emerging customary norms to disputes over liability, jurisdiction, and resource rights.

Public international law — the body of rules governing relations between states — provides the normative backdrop against which space law operates. Its modern foundations rest on the UN Charter (1945), the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (1969), the work of the International Law Commission on state responsibility, and decisions of the International Court of Justice. Doctrines such as sovereignty, non-intervention, state responsibility for internationally wrongful acts, peaceful settlement of disputes, and the prohibition on the use of force under Article 2(4) of the Charter all apply, with appropriate adaptation, to activities in outer space. In the space domain, public international law fills interpretive gaps left by the lex specialis of the OST and its sister treaties. Questions about attribution of conduct to a state when private operators cause harm, the lawfulness of countermeasures in response to interference with space assets, the application of international humanitarian law to military uses of space, and the role of customary international law in shaping norms on debris mitigation and rendezvous and proximity operations are all live issues. Recent disputes — from jamming of satellite signals during the war in Ukraine to cyber operations targeting space infrastructure — have underscored that general international law remains indispensable for resolving conflicts that the specialised treaties do not expressly address.

The law of outer space, as codified principally in the 1967 Outer Space Treaty and elaborated through the four subsequent UN space treaties, rests on a handful of foundational principles: freedom of exploration and use, non-appropriation, peaceful purposes, international responsibility of launching states, and cooperation. For decades these principles were applied largely to a limited set of governmental actors. Today, the field is being reshaped by commercial human spaceflight, in-orbit servicing, planned mining of lunar and asteroid resources, the militarisation and weaponisation debate, and an exponential rise in the number of objects in Earth orbit. Several specific controversies define the contemporary law of outer space. The legality of unilateral national legislation authorising resource extraction — adopted by the United States (2015), Luxembourg (2017), the UAE (2019), and Japan (2021) — is contested under Article II of the OST. The Artemis Accords have polarised states between those endorsing safety zones and resource use and those, led by Russia and China, who view such arrangements as inconsistent with multilateral negotiation under COPUOS. Orbital debris, light pollution from mega-constellations, and the absence of binding rules on rendezvous and proximity operations or ASAT testing have prompted UN General Assembly resolutions, including the 2022 commitment by some states to refrain from destructive direct-ascent ASAT tests. These tensions form the backdrop for the legal questions delegates will argue in the moot.