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The issue of the defining elements of a truly fair justice system has become a constant and consistent concern of international and/or regional political and legal organisations. Given the scale of the phenomenon of establishing and resorting to international courts and tribunals, reflecting, among others, the preference and availability of international actors for settling their disputes by independent and impartial decision-makers, the principles and values of the international judiciary have been subjected to discussions in an increasingly elaborate manner. Among these, judicial independence occupies a special position, being tightly connected to the issue of the legitimacy of such institutions, as an essential factor in ensuring voluntary compliance to the internationally adopted decisions. In this context, the present paper addresses the independence of the judiciary in international courts, both in terms of the fundamental theoretical contributions and from a practical perspective, by following the institutional provisions and guarantees for ensuring an independent and impartial judiciary in the statutes of two of the most relevant international courts, namely the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

The question of adjudication in international financial law has rarely been analysedcomprehensively in the legal literature. This can probably be explained with the factthat, unlike in other areas of international economic law, there is no internationalfinancial court specifically designed to adjudicate international disputes between financial regulators, or between governments and financial institutions or investors.Moreover, the informality of regulatory cooperation through Transnational RegulatoryNetworks (TRNs), the use of soft laws to regulate international financial relations, andthe presence of prudential carve-outs in international treaties was supposed to keepfinancial supervisory and regulatory authorities free from international scrutiny and tolimit the judicial review of regulatory measures to a purely domestic exercise. Yet, financial measures are increasingly challenged in international investment tribunals, human rights courts, and regional courts. From 1995 to 2016, there have been more than 100 known international disputes on financial services, of which roughly two thirds involved a supervisory measure such as the resolution or bankruptcy of an insolvent bank or the imposition of supervisory fines. The remaining claims mostly included violation of sovereign debt contracts, or emergency legislation affecting financial services. Investment arbitrations, in particular, are considerably on the rise. The increased number of regulatory disputes represents fundamental implications for the financial regulatory community in terms of domestic governance, regulatory cooperation, and global financial stability.This essay empirically investigates and maps for the first time the patterns of international adjudication in financial law, and comments on what the rise of international litigation means for the global financial architecture.

This article discusses the problems with enforcement of decisions of international courts. The issue of compliance by states with decisions of international courts is critical for the whole system of international law. If states cannot rely on law and have it clarified and enforced through courts' judgements, international law would become useless, disregarded, avoided and replaced by economic or military pressure or force. There exist a variety of different enforcement mechanisms in courts with global (International Court of Justice, World Trade Organization Dispute Settlement Body) and regional (European Court of Justice, Economic Court of the Commonwealth of Independent States, Court of Eurasian Economic Union) reach. Basically every international court has got some type of formal enforcement mechanism, even if it is only political in nature. But none can be called very effective and in particular – efficient. Some of them are equipped with economic sanctions (suspension of concessions, penalty payment, lump sum). They are not used often though. One should note that records of compliance with decision of courts which are able to impose sanctions are also far from being perfect. In particular, it seems that wealthy states can simply afford bearing economic sanctions without execution of the court decision. They therefore "buy themselves out" of their legal obligations. There is no doubt that for the sake of international legal certainty and stability it is desirable that international community pays more attention to improving the mechanisms for enforcement of decisions of international courts.

This article discusses the problems with enforcement of decisions of international courts. The issue of compliance by states with decisions of international courts is critical for the whole system of international law. If states cannot rely on law and have it clarified and enforced through courts' judgements, international law would become useless, disregarded, avoided and replaced by economic or military pressure or force. There exist a variety of different enforcement mechanisms in courts with global (International Court of Justice, World Trade Organi-zation Dispute Settlement Body) and regional (European Court of Justice, Economic Court of the Commonwealth of Independ-ent States, Court of Eurasian Economic Union) reach. Basi-cally every international court has got some type of formal enforcement mechanism, even if it is only political in nature. But none can be called very effective and in particular – effi-cient. Some of them are equipped with economic sanctions (suspension of concessions, penalty payment, lump sum). They are not used often though. One should note that records of compliance with decision of courts which are able to impose sanctions are also far from being perfect. In particular, it seems that wealthy states can simply afford bearing economic sanc-tions without execution of the court decision. They therefore "buy themselves out" of their legal obligations. There is no doubt that for the sake of international legal certainty and stability it is desirable that international community pays more attention to improving the mechanisms for enforcement of decisions of international courts.

International audience ; International courts (ICs) have not only been specifying States' duties, but have also contributed to the definition of States themselves. The article focuses on the case-law of three ICs: the International Court of Justice qua generalist international law court, and its making of the 'internationalised State'; the European Court of Human Rights qua regional human rights court, and its moulding of the 'democratic State'; and the Court of Justice of the European Union qua court of a regional economic organisation, and its making of the 'managerial State'. The first part assesses the role of ICs in the development of the international law of statehood. The second part identifies the making of the State in the three ICs' case-law and compares the ways in which statehood is actually performed through international jurisprudence. A third part presents three critiques of the contemporary international jurisprudence of statehood and explores ways to reform it.

Amicus curiae participation in international courts is steadily growing since the late 1990 despite lack of clarity on the concept's nature, function and utility in international dispute settlement. Does amicus curiae infuse international judicial proceedings with alternative views, including the public interest in a case, as often advocated by NGOs? Does it increase the legitimacy and transparency of international dispute settlement, or the coherence of international law? Or is it an unhelpful impostor that impedes negotiated solutions and derails the proceedings at the expense of the parties to advance its own agenda? By way of an empirical-comparative analysis of the laws and practices of the ICJ, the ITLOS, the ECtHR, the IACtHR, the IACtHPR, WTO panels and the Appellate Body, and investment arbitration the dissertation examines the status quo of amicus curiae before international courts and tribunals to determine if the current amicus curiae practice is of added value to international proceedings and international dispute settlement in general. The dissertation shows that there is no common concept of international amicus curiae, but that amicus curiae before the international courts examined share a few characteristics. A proposed functional systematization highlights overlaps and diverging uses of the concept before international courts and helps scholars and practitioners to assess the opportunities and limits of the concept. Analysis of the concept's current regulatory framework and its substantive effectiveness reveals a hesitation in particular by courts with a strong adversarial tradition to take into account the views of a non-party despite the positive experience with the concept in regional human rights courts. The dissertation concludes that neither the expectations nor the concerns attached to amicus curiae participation in international proceedings have materialized. It argues that the concept can contribute to improved decisions and decision-making in international dispute settlement if regulated and used properly.

The International Court of Justice (ICJ) presides over the contentious issues, such as boundary disputes and military conflict, for all United Nation's (UN) members. Its rulings, legally binding, guide international affairs between states by holding them accountable to international law. Previous studies have found that the judges on the ICJ display judicial bias. However, scholars have yet to evaluate whether judges are influenced by a regional association with a party in the cases. To evaluate the role of region in ICJ rulings, I developed a dataset containing: 1) nationality of judges in contentious cases, 2) states party to a case, 3) states' regions, and 4) case subject. This data is then used to evaluate the relationship between ICJ judges, state region, and the outcome of case rulings in order to determine whether regional bias exist today within the UN.

States are free, yet everywhere live under international courts and tribunals (ICs). As they proliferate and gain power across ever more domains, ICs become targets of resistance and criticism that they are illegitimate authorities. What reasons might a state have to defer to an IC's judgment or interpretation, even when the state regards it as mistaken, and even when it conflicts with the interests and objectives of government? Section I sketches the multiple tasks of ICs, in complex interdependence with other actors. Their core task is to adjudicate disputes through interpretation and application of international law by legal methods. This may also contribute indirectly to a range of further tasks. Section II addresses some aspects of the relation between normative legitimacy of ICs and descriptive legitimacy - actors' beliefs therein. Section III shows how a wide range of legitimacy challenges concern ways ICs fail to carry out their tasks. This account does not seek to provide substantive arguments or seek to show that all such criticisms are correct. The aims are rather to make many such criticisms comprehensible as legitimacy concerns, to provide a rationale for popular taxonomies of legitimacy criticisms, and to indicate which premises and arguments are required for such criticisms to be sound.

Principal-Agent (P-A) theory sees the fact of delegation as defining a relationship be-tween states (collective Principals) and international organizations (Agents) with recon-tracting threats being the predominate way states influence IOs. Developing a category of Trustee-Agents, I argue that recontracting tools will be both harder to use and less effective at influencing the Trustee-Agents. Trustee-Agents are 1) selected because of their personal reputation or professional norms, 2) given independent authority to make decisions according to their best judgement or professional criteria, and 3) empowered to act on behalf of a beneficiary. Focusing on state-International Courts (IC) relations, the article develops an alternative explanation that highlights the need for international judges to balance legal fidelity with the significant international challenge of endeav-ouring compliance. The arguments are explored through three case studies of IC deci-sion-making that call into question the 'rational expectations' claim that ICs are tailor-ing their decisions to reflect the wishes of powerful states and avoid adverse recontracting.

The International Court of Justice has jurisdiction over disputes between nations, and has decided dozens of cases since it began operations in 1946. Its academic defenders argue that the ICJ decides cases impartially and confers legitimacy on the international legal system. Its critics – mostly outside the academy – argue that the members of the ICJ vote the interests of the states that appoint them. Prior empirical scholarship is ambiguous. We test the charge of political bias using statistical methods. We find strong evidence that (1) judges favor the state that appoints them; (2) judges favor states whose wealth level is close to that of the judges' own state; and (3) judges favor states whose political system is similar to that of the judges' own state. We find weak evidence that judges are influenced by regional and military alignments.

We study the role of international tribunals, like the International Criminal Court (ICC), as an effective way of reducing the number and/or gravity of crimes against humanity. The action of the ICC is directed against leaders that promote or tolerate these kinds of crimes, that is, political authorities, army commanders, civil leaders, etc. In order to simulate the action of the ICC we build a hierarchical society where the most important leaders have the highest connectivity and can spread their points of view, or their orders, through a chain of less but still highly connected deputy chiefs or opinion chieftains. In this way, if they practice misconduct, corruption, or any kind of discriminatory or criminal actions against individuals or groups, it would very difficult and improbable that they will be prosecuted by the courts of their own country. It is to alleviate this situation that the ICC was created. Its mission is to process and condemn crimes against humanity though a supranational organism that can act on criminal leaders in any country. In this study, the action of the ICC is simulated by removing the corrupt leader and replacing it by a ''decent'' one. However, as the action of the corrupt leader could have spread among the population by the time the ICC acts, we try to determine if a unique action of the ICC is sufficient or if further actions are required, depending on the degree of deterioration of the human rights in the hypothetical country. The results evidence the positive effect of the ICC action with a relatively low number of interventions. The effect of the ICC is also compared with the action of the local national judiciary system.

This dissertation asks: when do international courts promote cooperation among countries? I argue that international courts can successfully restore economic relations between disputing governments but their impact depends on domestic politics. When confronted with an adverse legal ruling from an international court, a defendant government must determine whether and when to comply. Governments are constrained by domestic institutional divisions and partisan conflict: "veto points." Countries with substantial divisions are less likely to comply because more political actors must coordinate to implement the ruling. As partisan divisions grow, government leaders are constrained by their domestic opposition and compliance becomes more difficult. The design of the international court contributes to this effect. Courts vary in their ability to sanction violations. When the court is designed to be flexible, imposing low costs for noncompliance, the impact of domestic politics is particularly pronounced. These arguments are tested with international trade disputes at the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the European Court of Justice (ECJ). The first empirical chapter uses WTO disputes to examine the impact of domestic politics in the defendant country on compliance with adverse legal rulings. Adverse rulings require a defendant government to remove trade barriers so this chapter assesses compliance using trade flows. I build a novel data set on compliance using the method of synthetic case control and product-level time-series trade data. I infer the defendant complied if trade flows increased after the dispute, relative to estimated levels that would have occurred in the absence of the ruling. The estimates show compliance problems are both widespread and systematically linked to domestic politics. Domestic constraints---measured in terms of veto points---hinder compliance.The second empirical chapter tests my main argument on the European Court of Justice. I show that domestic political constraints in European Union countries also impact compliance with adverse legal rulings. I focus on infringement disputes over trade-related issues, instances in which European member states imposed illegal barriers to intra-European commerce. This chapter uses a hierarchical model that captures the multi-level structure of the data. By examining intra-European trade over time, I show that adverse rulings lead to a modest increase in trade but this tendency is conditional on domestic politics. Defendant governments with many veto players appear impervious to adverse rulings. The findings indicate that ECJ rulings can prompt governments to open their markets to more European commerce, but that domestic politics can obstruct this process. The third empirical chapter evaluates the effectiveness of international dispute settlement along a different dimension: the time to resolve a dispute. Because prolonged lawsuits can buy defendants time to ``cheat'' at the expense of plaintiffs and other members of the international institution, they can have deleterious effects on cooperation that are similar to noncompliance. This chapter demonstrates that WTO and ECJ lawsuits against defendants with many domestic veto points lasted longer on average, before the countries acquiesced. Moreover, the ill effect of veto players on dispute resolution has been stronger in the WTO than the ECJ. I argue that the design of the international court mediates the impact of domestic veto players on dispute duration. In sum, my dissertation shows that international courts can successfully promote economic cooperation between countries but their effectiveness hinges on domestic politics.

The African Court of Human and Peoples' Rights (ACtHPR) made history on August 27, 2018. The majority of its judges were female—six of 11, and the first among international courts and tribunals (ICs) to secure sex parity—that is, numerical equality.1 This achievement is even more remarkable given that only 23% of the judges and arbitrators of the ICs are women.2 The milestone also prompts us to consider more closely what considerations of legitimacy entail about the proportion of women international judges. The present composition of ICs is clearly under legal, social, and political control, and ICs have profound effects. The persistent underrepresentation of women is especially striking since not only civil society groups, but also the states who nominate and establish election procedures have agreed several treaties that require or urge a balance of gender representation.3 So it would seem that the parity achieved by the ACtHPR should be applauded. However, that IC may now be even more gender equal than we may have reason to require of a legitimate IC—or so this article argues. A less egalitarian composition within a "parity zone" of approximately 40% of either of the main sexes seems to suffice. The present reflections considers various possible arguments offered concerning the impact of gender inequality on the international bench, drawing in part on studies of domestic judiciaries, as well as on available research and reflections by practitioners and women international judges.4 Several arguments support calls to increase the proportion of female international judges—but how far? Section 2 addresses some background issues: first concerning the terms "feminism," "sex," and "gender," then, the tasks of ICs that should lead us to question the present sex inequality on the international bench.

The national resource privilege, which holds that states are allowed to control all the natural resources found in their territory, is a cornerstone of international politics. Supporters of the national resource privilege claim that without the privilege states would fail to be sovereign and self-determining entities which provide for the needs of their citizens. However, as this paper shows the case is not as simple as that. In fact, control over resources must be carefully unpacked. Doing so shows that states do not require full control over all resources found in their territory in order to be sovereign. Moreover, sovereignty and self-determination come with a set of responsibilities and duties attached. Based on these observations the paper will sketch the contours of an alternative resource governance scheme built around the idea of an International Court of the Environment.

From the point of the EU law, the CJEU has the exclusive competence to interpret the EU legal norms and decide upon validity of the legal acts adopted by the EU institutions because it is the most effective method to ensure the unilateral interpretation of the EU law and to prevent its fragmentation. Thus, it can be presumed that all disputes between the Member States regarding the EU law must be solved by the CJEU. The paper aims at finding the answer to the question whether international courts under the international law must refuse their jurisdiction in cases where disputes of the Member States relate with the EU law. With the view of this aim, arguments arising from the international law (for instance, prohibition of intervening into affairs of another legal system, prohibition of abuse of laws), on the basis of which an international court should decline its jurisdiction, and applicability of such arguments to the situation discussed is assessed and an independent approach is formulated. ; Tarptautinės teisės ir Europos Sąjungos teisės koreliacija neišvengiama ir tai sukelia aktualių teorinio bei praktinio pobūdžio problemų. Viena iš jų – Europos Sąjungos Teisingumo Teismo ir tarptautinių teismų jurisdikcijos atskyrimo problema. Pastaruoju metu šis klausimas tampa ypač aktualus ir tai susiję su vis ryškesniu Europos Sąjungos vaidmeniu tarptautinėje arenoje. ES yra prisijungusi prie daugelio tarptautinių sutarčių, dalis jų numato atskiras ginčų sprendimo institucijas, kurioms suteikta kompetencija spęsti ginčus, kylančius dėl tokių susitarimų aiškinimo ir taikymo. Tačiau pagal ES teisę išimtiniai įgaliojimai aiškinti ES teisės normas suteikti ESTT. Teismas yra nustatęs ir savo išimtinius įgaliojimus aiškinti tas mišrių sutarčių nuostatas, dėl kurių Sąjunga turi kompetenciją. Taigi galėtume teigti, kad valstybės narės visus tarpusavio ginčus, kylančius iš ES teisės, įskaitant ir mišrios sutarties nuostatas, dėl kurių Sąjunga turi kompetenciją, privalo spręsti ESTT. Todėl jų kreipimasis į kitą tarptautinį teismą (arbitražą) pažeistų išimtinius ESTT įgaliojimus pagal Sutarties dėl Europos Sąjungos veikimo (toliau tekste – SESV) 344 straipsnį, o tai galėtų inspiruoti Europos Komisiją pradėti ginčo sprendimo procedūrą ESTT pagal SESV 258 straipsnį Išimtinių įgaliojimų aiškinti ES teisės normas bei spręsti dėl ES institucijų priimtų teisės aktų galiojimo suteikimas ESTT yra efektyviausias būdas užtikrinti vienodą ES teisės aiškinimą ir užkirsti kelią ES teisės fragmentacijai. Vis dėlto šie išimtiniai ESTT įgaliojimai paremti argumentais, išplaukiančiais iš ES teisinės sistemos sui generis pobūdžio. Tuo tarpu šioje publikacijoje siekiama pažvelgti į ESTT ir tarptautinių teismų jurisdikcijos atskyrimo klausimą ne tik iš ES teisės, bet ir iš tarptautinės teisės pozicijų. Todėl siekėme atsakyti į klausimą, ar tarptautiniai teismai pagal tarptautinę teisę privalo paneigti savo jurisdikciją tuo atveju, jei ginčas tarp valstybių narių siejasi su ES teise. Šiuo tikslu analizavome tam tikrus tarptautinių teismų sprendimus, kurie iliustruoja jų požiūrį į ESTT išimtinius įgaliojimus aiškinti ES teisės normas. Nors, kaip rodo teismų praktika, jie yra linkę paneigti savo jurisdikciją tuo atveju, jei mano, kad ginčas priskirtinas kito teismo išimtinei jurisdikcijai, tačiau nepateikia aiškių tokios pozicijos teisinių argumentų. Todėl publikacijoje analizavome iš tarptautinės teisės kylančius argumentus (pavyzdžiui, draudimo kištis į svetimos teisinės sistemos reikalus, draudimo piktnaudžiauti teise), kuriais remdamasis tarptautinis teismas privalėtų paneigti savo jurisdikciją, bei formuluodami savarankišką požiūrį vertinome tokių argumentų tinkamumą aptariamai situacijai.