Sze Hong Lam

Institution: The Grotius Centre for International Legal Studies, Leiden University

Period of stay: 28 April to 4 July 2025

Contact: lamsh@vuw.leidenuniv.nl

Profile: 

Sze Hong Lam (Ocean) is a PhD Candidate at the Grotius Centre of International Legal Studies of the Leiden University. His PhD research, supervised by Prof. dr. Larissa van den Herik and Prof. dr. Carsten Stahn, explores how the social-political discourses of self-determination interacted with the right to self-determination during the Sino-British negotiations on the future of Hong Kong. At Leiden, Ocean designs and teaches courses for undergraduates and postgraduates on public international law and international criminal law. He also coached the IBA ICC Moot Court Competition for the Leiden team in 2021-2022, and 2022-2024. Ocean had formerly interned at the Legal Office of the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) and the Office of the Prosecutor of the United Nations International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals (IRMCT). Since 2023, Ocean has been an elected member of the Steering Committee of the European Society of International Law’s Interest Group on the History of International Law. He holds an Advanced Master of Law (LLM) from Leiden University, a Postgraduate Certificate in Laws (PCLL), and a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) from the University of Hong Kong. His research interests cover public international law, history, international relations, and their interconnections.

Research Area:

Self-determination, autonomy, history of international law

Research Title:

Navigating between Empires: the discourses of self-determination in and about Hong Kong

Research Outline:

Ocean's current research explores how the social-political discourses of self-determination interacted with the corresponding international legal discourse during the Sino-British negotiations on Hong Kong’s future. The research looks at three major historical events: (1) Resolution 2908(XXVII) of the United Nations General Assembly that removed Hong Kong from the Chapter XI List of the Non-Self-Governing-Territories in 1972; (2) the Sino-British negotiations on the future of Hong Kong from 1979 to 1984; and (3) the drafting of the Basic Law of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region by the People’s Republic of China from 1986 to 1990.

Using ‘Hong Kong as a method’, the present research aims to reveal how self-determination as a language has been appropriated, interpreted, and re-invented by different actors in their encounters, struggles, and claims against each other. The research employs both doctrinal and archival historical methods. In particular, this thesis looks at recently declassified documents on the Future of Hong Kong from the UK National Archives (TNA), the memoires of important PRC policy-makers, and the Basic Law Drafting History Online (BLDHO). It is argued that, far from challenging the state-centric notion of international law, Hong Kong’s example showed that the legal norm of self-determination has remained in practice deeply entrapped in the existing state-centric structure of the international legal order. This thesis challenges both the traditional positivist view that the right to self-determination has a stable meaning in the decolonial context and the policy-oriented narratives that focus exclusively on the emancipatory aspects of self-determination.

SSRN:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=3985316

Publications:

Lam S.H. (2024), The gentle civilizer of the far east: a re-examination of the encounter between ‘China’ and ‘international law’, Journal of the History of International Law 26(1): 1-45.

Lam S.H. (2022), Should the ICC accept Taiwan’s delegation of ad hoc criminal jurisdiction?: A debate on Taiwan’s functional statehood in the context of Article 12(3) of the Rome Statute, Cambridge International Law Journal 11(1): 51-74.

Lam S.H. (2023), Unequal treaties: Revisiting China’s Approaches Toward Colonial Injustice. The 18th Annual Conference of the European Society of International Law. Presented at the pre-conference workshop "Historical Perspectives on Fairness in International Law", European Society of International Law's Interest Group on the History of International Law, Aix-en-Provence.

Lam S.H. (21 October 2022), To Perfect the Imperfect Title: How Referenda were Historically Manipulated to Justify Territorial Conquest by Nations. EJIL: Talk!: European Journal of International Law. [blog entry].

Lam S.H. & Hung W.A. (12 November 2022), Short of War: Is the World Ready to Defend Taiwan? The National Interest. Washington D.C.: Center for the National Interest. [web article].

Information contained in these profiles is provided by visitors at the time of their stay. The accuracy of the content and links is not guaranteed.