Suchergebnisse

In 2017 the International Court of Justice (ICJ or Court) made only procedural decisions, one on preliminary objections, one on counterclaims, and two on provisional measures. Three other new applications were made to the Court, all linked to earlier cases: Malaysia applied for the revision, and interpretation, of the judgment in the Pedra Branca/Pulau Batu Puteh case; and Costa Rica brought a case against Nicaragua concerning their land boundary in the area of Los Portillos, the latest in a long line of cases between the two states. Judges Ronny Abraham (France), Dalveer Bhandari (India), Antonio Cançado Trindade (Brazil), and Abdulqawi Yusuf (Somalia) were reelected to the Court, and one new judge, Nawaf Salam (Lebanon) was elected. The UK failed to secure the reelection of its judge, Christopher Greenwood. For the first time since the establishment of the ICJ, the UK will have no judge on the Court. This failure may be taken as an indication of its declining influence in international relations, arguably attributable in part to Brexit, and it marks the end of the convention that each permanent member of the Security Council will have a judge of its nationality on the Court. Nor was the UK able to prevent a request by the UN General Assembly (passed by ninety-four in favor to fifteen against, with sixty-five abstentions) for an Advisory Opinion on the legal consequences of the separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965—a sensitive issue for the UK, and one that has already been the subject of much litigation.

The three disparate cases decided by the International Court of Justice (Court or ICJ) in 2014 may not contribute much to the development of substantive international law, but they are instructive about the operations of the Court. Perhaps the Court was not at its finest in terms of coherent legal reasoning in these three cases; it certainly avoided difficult questions in all of them. Yet each of the three cases had significant numbers of separate and dissenting opinions, which sometimes reveal more about the Court's reasoning than is apparent from the judgment or order itself.

The role of the UN and the legitimacy of its collective security system have been seriously challenged in recent years. First, because of the Security Council.s failure to act in cases of genocide or other humanitarian disaster. There has been much criticism of the limited and delayed response of the Security Council to events in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwanda, somewhat unfairly in so far as it was the lack of political will on the part of the Member States rather than any institutional failure that was responsible for the failure to act. Secondly, the UN's central role in collective security has been undermined by unilateral use of force by States. After the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 the UN was sidelined with regard to the forcible response against Afghanistan: inOperation Enduring Freedomthe USA preferred not to act through the UN or even through NATO. Subsequently, theUS National Security Strategy(September 2002) famously made no mention of the UN as a means of addressing perceived new threats from global terrorists. Most seriously, the USOperation Iraqi Freedomin 2003 was undertaken unilaterally, that is, without express Security Council authorization.1This was often portrayed as a crisis of legitimacy for the UN as much as for the USA and the States which participated in the invasion. As the Deputy Secretary-General put it recently: