Manfred Lachs Space Law Moot Court Competition - Kenya National Rounds

Space law emerged in the late 1950s as Cold War rivalry pushed states to negotiate ground rules for a new frontier. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty (OST) established foundational principles: outer space is the province of all humankind, not subject to national appropriation; states bear international responsibility for national activities, including those of non-governmental entities; celestial bodies are to be used exclusively for peaceful purposes; and weapons of mass destruction may not be placed in orbit. Subsequent UN instruments — the 1968 Rescue Agreement, 1972 Liability Convention, 1975 Registration Convention, and the largely unratified 1979 Moon Agreement — built out the corpus, with UNCOPUOS and UNOOSA as the principal forums. The contemporary landscape has outpaced this framework. Mega-constellations such as Starlink and OneWeb have multiplied active satellites tenfold within a decade, intensifying orbital debris and spectrum-coordination concerns. Destructive anti-satellite (ASAT) tests by China (2007), India (2019), and Russia (2021) generated long-lived debris fields and prompted a US-led voluntary moratorium endorsed by the General Assembly. Commercial actors now plan lunar resource extraction; the US Artemis Accords and parallel national space-resource laws (USA, Luxembourg, UAE, Japan) advance a permissive interpretation of OST Article II, while Russia and China have launched a competing International Lunar Research Station initiative. Core disputes today concern the legality of unilateral resource appropriation, liability for collisions and debris, the militarisation versus weaponisation distinction, and how to extend traditional state-centric rules to private actors. Negotiations on Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space (PAROS) remain deadlocked at the Conference on Disarmament, and the UN Open-Ended Working Group on reducing space threats has produced norms but no binding instrument. Moot problems typically probe these fault lines through hypothetical disputes involving satellite interference, lunar mining, or third-party damage.

Modern international law traces its architecture to the post-Westphalian state system and was decisively reshaped after 1945. The UN Charter, the Statute of the International Court of Justice, and the 1969 Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties codified the sources recognised in ICJ Statute Article 38: treaties, customary international law, general principles, and, as subsidiary means, judicial decisions and scholarship. On this foundation the post-war order built specialised regimes — international humanitarian law (Geneva Conventions), human rights law, the law of the sea (UNCLOS), international criminal law, trade law (GATT/WTO), and environmental law — each with its own institutions and dispute-settlement bodies. Despite this density, enforcement remains decentralised and politically contingent. The ICJ depends on state consent; the ICC's jurisdiction is contested by major powers including the United States, Russia, China, and India; and Security Council vetoes have repeatedly blocked responses to crises in Syria, Ukraine, and Gaza. Recurring questions concern the legality of the use of force outside Article 51 and Council authorisation (e.g., Kosovo 1999, Iraq 2003), the doctrines of humanitarian intervention and the Responsibility to Protect, the reach of universal jurisdiction, and the relationship between state sovereignty and erga omnes obligations such as the prohibition of genocide. Current flashpoints illustrate the system's strain and resilience. South Africa's genocide case against Israel and Ukraine's proceedings against Russia have placed the ICJ at the centre of active conflicts; ICC arrest warrants against sitting leaders have tested cooperation obligations under the Rome Statute; and advisory opinions on climate obligations, the Chagos Archipelago, and the occupied Palestinian territories are reshaping doctrine. For moot purposes, contemporary problems often weave together treaty interpretation, state responsibility under the ILC Articles, and jurisdictional questions before international tribunals.