Suchergebnisse

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.

The archives produced by international courts have received little empirical, theoretical or methodological attention within international criminal justice (ICJ) or international relations (IR) studies. Yet, as this book argues, these archives both contain a significant record of past violence, and also help to constitute the international community as a particular reality. As such, this book first offers an interdisciplinary reading of archives, integrating new insights from IR, archival science and post-colonial anthropology to establish the link between archives and community formation. It then focuses on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda's archive, to offer a critical reading of how knowledge is produced in international courts, provides an account of the type of international community that is imagined within these archives, and establishes the importance of the materiality of archives for understanding how knowledge is produced and contested within the international domain.

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.