The regulation of emerging technologies often involves prolonged legislative processes that demand significant attention and resources. Setting a future-proof framework is therefore imperative: not only to accommodate innovation, but to hedge against the uncertainties that render detailed legislation obsolete. The drafting of legal frameworks to regulate emerging technologies increasingly engages a variety of future-proofing techniques.

Surveillance laws are more susceptible to the need for future-proofing. The nature of intelligence agencies and their operational need to remain secretive provide powerful incentives to prevent their governing legal framework from undergoing frequent legislative revision. Accordingly, surveillance laws are often drafted in a manner catering to these constraints.

This article maps and assesses the principal future-proofing strategies available to legislators. It then examines Israeli surveillance law as a test case. The article analyses the Israel Security Agency (ISA) Law, which, inter alia, governs the online surveillance activities of Israel’s domestic security agency, the ISA. The article examines the language of the ISA Law currently in force. It explores a past expansion of its purposive domain through the deployment of ISA surveillance for COVID-19 contact-tracing, and the subsequent judicial narrowing of the statutory provision enabling this deployment. The article then discusses in detail the future of ISA surveillance powers and their future-proofing mechanisms pursuant to the recently published ISA Amendment Memorandum.

Since the 1970s the EU has expressed its continuous commitment to contributing to the resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict. This commitment, which is increasingly linked to its obligation to advance the rule of international law, is manifested in its support for the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside the State of Israel (the two-state solution). The article contributes to the literature on the EU’s efforts in conflict resolution in the context of the Conflict, and it does so in the scholarly contexts of international law, EU law, international relations, and European integration. Firstly, it identifies a dissonance between, on the one hand, the EU’s strong interest in the resolution of the Conflict and its firm commitment to such resolution and its long-standing engagement in promoting such resolution; and, on the other hand, its actual, ineffective contribution to achieving that goal. Secondly, it analyses the two principal instruments adopted by the EU towards Israel: (i) the linkage between the upgrading of EU–Israel relations and advancement towards the resolution of the Conflict (the linkage instrument), and (ii) the policy of granting trade and trade-related benefits to entities and products situated within the recognised borders of the State of Israel, while withholding the benefits of EU–Israeli cooperation from entities and products in the Occupied Territories (the differentiation instrument). The article represents the first attempt to analyse these instruments together, and to do so within the overarching theoretical framework of the EU’s actorness and effectiveness in its external relations. It concludes that the ineffectiveness of these instruments renders the EU’s involvement itself ineffective, thereby preventing the EU from contributing meaningfully to the resolution of the Conflict. The analysis of the article focuses on EU efforts over the last 30 years, and its conclusions are examined against the developments in the Middle East since the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023.

This article analyses the legal classification framework applicable in cross-border non-international armed conflicts (NIACs) through the lens of international humanitarian law (IHL). It defines cross-border NIACs as armed conflicts involving a state or a multinational force, engaging non-state armed groups on the territory of another state, with or without that state’s consent; as well as hostilities between non-state armed groups across state borders. Where a state acts without the territorial state’s consent, overlapping legal classifications may arise, necessitating use of the ‘double classification’ method. Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions and customary IHL are identified as the core legal sources that apply to this variation of NIAC, while the potential extraterritorial application of Additional Protocol II 1977 (AP II) is considered in the light of the analogy with international human rights law. The article contends that when a state exercises effective control over persons in cross-border NIACs, obligations under AP II may extend extraterritorially to its armed forces.

Professor John-Stewart Gordon addresses in his new book – The Robot Rights Manifesto (Palgrave Macmillan, 2026) – the individual rights owing to AI systems. In a nutshell, Gordon claims that the more that advanced AI systems come to resemble human beings – both in their physical appearance (in the form of humanoid robots or virtual persons) and in their sapience (capacity to reason and apply moral considerations) and sentience (capacity to experience suffering, pain and pleasure) – the weaker the case becomes for differentiating between humans and AI systems with respect to access to rights. In particular, he argues that human-like robots are morally significant and should already be entitled to some rudimentary rights protection. Despite some doubts, Gordon’s book ultimately succeeds in its primary mission: to demonstrate that robot rights deserve moral consideration. It also succeeds in demonstrating how a bill of robot rights (and obligations) built upon such consideration could look. This is no small achievement.