Summary by Puhiza Shemsedini
On March 6-7, Nathanson Centre Fellow David Hughes, together with Patryk Labuda (Central European University) and Harshad Pathak (University of Geneva), co-organized “The Toronto Workshop on International Law and Double Standards.” Supported by the Nathanson Centre and hosted at Trinity College, University of Toronto, the closed workshop brought together the authors of an upcoming edited volume on the topic of double standards and international law to engage in discussions on their draft chapters and explore the key themes that connect their work.
States, civil society, and scholars of international law have long advanced arguments highlighting double standards. Recent events, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the ongoing conflict in Gaza, and the U.S.-Israel military strikes on Iran, have sharpened debates about how such claims are formulated, mobilized, and directed at different actors within the international legal order. These tensions have begun to register at the highest level of global politics, with world leaders, including Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, through his recent speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, publicly calling for the consistent application of international norms across conflicts and across alliances. It is precisely these questions, about when and why double standards arise, how they are mobilized, and what they reveal about the structure of international law itself, that the Toronto workshop set out to interrogate.
The Toronto workshop marked another significant milestone for The Double Standards Project. Building on the success of previous events in Berlin (2024) and Geneva (2025), which was also supported by the Nathanson Centre, 25 authors from 15 countries discussed their work. These discussions benefited from a wealth of insights across various areas of international law, including international human rights law, international criminal law, and international economic law, and were further enriched by contributions from leading scholars in international relations, diplomats, and political scientists.
The workshop’s programme was structured to foster an environment of in-depth and interactive academic discussion. Each participant had the opportunity to present their draft chapter, followed by a period of peer review and open-table discussion. The collaborative nature of the workshop enabled participants to dive deep into each paper, refine arguments, and exchange ideas with each other.
Among other things, discussions touched upon double standards as an inherent feature of international law, the uneven application of rules in cases that deserve equal treatment, hypocrisy in legal argumentation, inconsistency of rules in international organizations, as well as threats emerging from shifts in the international legal order and great power competition. All of these themes will feature in the forthcoming edited volume, which the workshop played a crucial role in shaping.
