Milano-Bicocca Research Unit
The Milano-Bicocca Research Unit includes professors, researchers and PhD students in International and Constitutional Law: Maurizio Arcari and Antonello Tancredi (Professors of International Law), Stefania Ninatti (Professor of Constitutional Law), Paolo Zicchittu (Researcher in Constitutional Law), Alice Ollino (Post-doctoral research fellow in International Law), Mariana Clara De Andrade and Bernardo Mageste Castelar (PhD candidates in International Law) and Marco Galimberti (PhD candidate in Constitutional Law).
The Unit will address the challenges arising from co-existence of international and regional sub-systems and examine their material interconnectedness. Over the past seventy years, international law has undergone a fundamental transformation, with emergence and proliferation of international regulatory frameworks and functional field-specific regimes challenging the classical inter-state structures. Traditional approaches proved inadequate to fully capture the overlap between different international legalities and to tackle the interconnectedness of their competing rationales. Through a contextual approach, the Research Unit will identify the legal principles and standards arising out of this overlap, in order to provide the techniques for their coordination in international law and adjudication.
As a starting point, the Research Unit will identify existing techniques and principles - either procedural or substantive – that international courts and tribunals employ to tackle the situations of inter-legality. These – among others - include the principle of systemic interpretation in Article 31.3 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties; the principle of proportionality applied by the Court of Justice of the EU; the equivalent protection and the margin of appreciation doctrines applied by the European Court of Human Rights.
The mapping of relevant case law in different fields will be the point of departure for developing an analytical methodology aimed at rethinking the questions of external independence, the scope of jurisdiction, as well as the role of international and national adjudication in inter-legality situations. The relevant areas under consideration will include: the WTO cases involving both environmental and trade law considerations; the ECJ and the ECtHR cases dealing with the conflict between international security and fundamental human rights; the ITLOS cases on the impact of environmental law and development in the law of the sea; domestic cases dealing with implementation of EU law or the ECHR. The ultimate aim of the Research Unit is to provide a toolbox for harmonizing differentiation in international law.