SeminarTuesday 10 March 2020
6:00pm – 7:00pm
British Management of Territorial Disputes and Lessons for the Japanese Government
Drinks reception: 7:00pm – 8:00pm
13/14 Cornwall Terrace, Outer Circle (entrance facing Regent's Park), London NW1 4QP
Organised by the Daiwa Anglo-Japanese Foundation
The three territorial disputes Japan has with its neighbours remain important factors of discord in Northeast Asia. They originated in Japan’s imperial expansion in the past and remain unresolved because of its sensitive public opinion in the present. The United Kingdom has richer experience of territorial disputes. It has settled many territorial disputes in the past and maintains five territorial disputes to date, from which the Japanese government should take some lessons. The Japanese government should learn from the effective use of international judicial procedures by the British government in the past, the most successful case being the Minquiers-Ecrehos case with the French government in 1953. The Japanese government should also learn from the British government’s failures: most recently, the defeat in the Chagos Islands case. The ICJ declared on 25 February 2019 that the British government should terminate its colonial occupation of the Chagos Islands as soon as possible, which had seemed to be completely under British sovereignty until then. Professor Tetsuya Toyoda discussed the standard of the Chagos Islands judgment, and how it may seriously affect Japan’s legal claims to Senkaku/Diaoyu and Dokdo/Takeshima.
Presentation by Professor ToyodaA video of the seminar can be found here:
About the contributors
Professor Tetsuya Toyoda
Professor Tetsuya Toyoda is Professor of International Law and the Director of the Institute for Asian Studies and Regional Collaboration at Akita International University (AIU) in Japan. He has been teaching international law and international organizations at AIU since 2007, with interruptions for his fellowship at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars at Washington, D.C. in the U.S.A. from August 2013 to April 2014 and the Margaret Thatcher Japan Foundation fellowship at the University of Buckingham in the U.K. from January to August 2019. Before joining AIU, he was a project researcher at the University of Tokyo (2006-2007) and an official of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (1994-2000). He graduated from the University of Tokyo and obtained his Diplôme d’études approfondies from the University of Paris II-Panthéon-Assas in France. He was a visiting lecturer at the Far Eastern Federal University in Russia in 2011-2015 and at the University of New South Wales in Australia in 2015-2018, and also has given lectures and talks at Wuhan University (2009), Moscow State University (2011), Seoul National University (2012), UC Berkeley (2013), Georgetown University (2013), Vietnamese National University of Humanities at Hanoi (2013), National University of Laos (2013), Hong Kong Baptist University (2014), Stanford University (2014) and the University of Indonesia (2015). Author of a book the early history of international law theories, Theory and Politics of the Law of Nations (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 2011), he is now preparing a book on territorial disputes in the comparative perspective.