INTERNATIONAL TRADE LAW

ASSIGNTMENT
ON
TOPIC-"International Court of Justice(ICJ)"

SUBMITTED BY:- SUBMITTED TO:-

SANDEEP KUMAR, DR. SATISH CHANDRA
14/ILB/029 (FACULTY OF LAW)
(4TH YEAR LAW)
TABLE OF CONTENTS
·0 INTRODUCTION

·1 POWERS OF ICJ

·2 FUNCTIONS OF ICJ AND OBJECTIVES

·3 COMPOSITION OF ICJ

·4 CONCLUSION

·5 BIBLOGRAPHY

INTRODUCTION
The International Court of Justice (French: Cour internationale de justice; commonly
referred to as the World Court, ICJ or The Hague) is the primary judicial branch of the
United Nations (UN). Seated in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, the court
settles legal disputes submitted to it by states and provides advisory opinions on legal
questions submitted to it by duly authorized international branches, agencies, and the
UN General Assembly. A court is both an independent body that answers legal questions
according to principles and rules of law, and the physical place where judicial
proceedings occur. The common design of courtrooms and rituals associated with
proceedings reflects the specific nature and importance of the administration of justice,
with the normally high ceilings and formal décor reflecting and reinforcing the idea of
the majesty of the law. Judges wearing robes sit above and apart from those articipating
in and observing the proceedings, while the disputing parties are placed in a position of
physical equality before the panel. All rise when the judges enter and leave the
courtroom. At the Peace Palace in The Hague, seat of the ICJ, the solemnity of the room
is further enhanced with a tier of stained glass windows that rises behind the judges. .
First, the court is a self-contained social phenomenon, physically isolated and
systematically distinct from other institutions. In addition, there are fixed roles played
by judge, litigant and witness, resulting in a proceeding that produces a decision on the
rights and duties of the parties. Independent courts also monitor the principle of the
rule of law that all conduct, including that of governments and their agents, is subject to
the law. Global and regional judicial bodies have been given the name, formal
characteristics, and symbolic attributes of a court. While they are all alike in having
guarantees of their independence and control over their procedures, *542 they differ in
their specific functions. Some of the courts, like the ICJ and the International Tribunal for
the Law of the Sea (“ITLOS”), are primarily intended to settle disputes between states.
Other courts, especially the regional human rights courts, serve as compliance bodies
and award reparations for human rights violations. A third group of international
tribunals is designed to enforce certain international norms, having jurisdiction to sit in
judgment of individuals accused of international crimes and impose penalties on those
found guilty. Finally, many international courts have been given competence to answer
hypothetical or abstract questions of international law through rendering advisory
opinions, a function close to lawmaking. The ICJ has commented on the nature of
judicial bodies and inherent judicial functions in respect to the work of the UN
Administrative Tribunal and its independence from control of the UN General Assembly.
During the 1950s

POWERS OF ICJ
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) handles contentious cases brought to it by
countries that have accepted its jurisdiction. Its workload has varied. It was quite busy
between 1946 and about 1966. Then its work tailed off in the 1970s. Communist
countries and Third World countries boycotted it as a club for rich western countries.
Since the late 1980s it has been busier than ever before (and much busier than the PCIJ
ever was). Countries have now found greater use of it; ironically about a third of recent
cases have been disputes between African countries. As at February 2005, the ICJ had
delivered 89 judgements since 1946, dealing with such matters as land frontiers and
maritime boundaries, territorial sovereignty, the non-use of force, non-interference in
the internal affairs of countries, diplomatic relations, hostage-taking, the right of asylum,
nationality, rites of passage and economic rights. The details are on the website:
http://www.icj-cij.org.

International courts are created for a variety of purposes. As Judge Fitzmaurice noted,
“courts of law . . . are there to protect existing and current legal rights, to secure
compliance with existing and current legal obligations, to afford concrete reparation if a
wrong has been committed.” He added that courts are not there to make legal
pronouncements in abstracto, yet some international courts have performed precisely
this function in responding to There is no international enforcement system. Once an ICJ
decision is made, there is no automatic "police force" to follow it up. The matter could
be referred to the UN Security Council but here it would be vulnerable to the veto
system of the five permanent members. For example, in the 1980s Nicaragua took the
United States to the ICJ over the mining of its harbours. When the US realized that the
case was going badly, it walked out of the ICJ and then vetoed attempts by the UN
Security Council to enforce the ICJ decision. There should be a campaign to encourage
governments to accept the ICJ's compulsory jurisdiction. A. Dispute Settlement The first
function assigned international courts is akin to the resolution of private disputes by civil
litigation within domestic legal systems. The purpose of such jurisdiction is to resolve
the issues between the parties and end the *558 dispute. Conflict resolution is a way to
avoid self-help and escalation of conflicts by channeling the dispute to a third-party
decision maker, a function even more important in international relations than in
domestic relations because, first, we are lacking international peacekeepers to
discourage recourse to violence, and, second, the consequences of an interstate conflict
are likely to go well beyond those conflicts that may arise between two individuals or
two companies. Courts are not the only forums to which disputes may be submitted; ad
hoc arbitral tribunals, mixed commissions, and fact-finding commissions of inquiry exist
or may be created. States have chosen to add adjudication by courts to this range of
options for peaceful settlement of disputes. The adjudicative function means that the
court has a duty “not only to reply to the questions as stated in the final submissions of
the parties, but also to abstain from deciding points not indicated in those submissions.”
This has not precluded judges from making pronouncements of law and principle that
may “enrich and develop the law” despite concerns about overstepping into lawmaking.
The role of the ICJ, the principal judicial organ of the UN, is to “decide disputes”
submitted to it in accordance with international law. The prominent place of the ICJ in
the peaceful dispute-settlement landscape is reinforced by the UN Charter's suggestion
in Article 36(3) that, instead of being taken up by the Security Council, “legal disputes
should as a general rule be referred by the parties to the ICJ in accordance with the
provisions of the Statute of the Court.” As a dispute-settlement body, the ICJ is not
primarily reviewing compliance with the UN Charter or other international agreements;
indeed, the Charter drafters denied the ICJ the power of judicial review of the UN
Charter organs or the ultimate authority to interpret the Charter.

FUNCTIONS OF ICJ AND OBJECTIVES

The Court has two functions:
To settle, in accordance with international law, legal disputes submitted by States, and To
give advisory opinions on legal questions referred to it by authorized UN organs and
specialized agencies. The Court sits in the Peace Palace, along with other institutions
concerned with international law, including the Peace Palace Library. The Peace Palace
Library is not a UN body. It provides excellent research guides on a variety of
international law topics. When deciding cases, the court applies international law as
summarized in Article 38 of the ICJ Statute, which provides that in arriving at its
decisions the court shall apply international conventions, international custom and the
"general principles of law recognized by civilized nations." It may also refer to academic
writing ("the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations")
and previous judicial decisions to help interpret the law although the court is not
formally bound by its previous decisions under the doctrine of stare decisis. Article 59
makes clear that the common law notion of precedent or stare decisis does not apply to
the decisions of the ICJ. The court's decision binds only the parties to that particular
controversy. Under 38(1)(d), however, the court may consider its own previous decisions.

If the parties agree, they may also grant the court the liberty to decide ex aequo et bono
("in justice and fairness"),[40] granting the ICJ the freedom to make an equitable
decision based on what is fair under the circumstances. That provision has not been used
in the court's history. So far, the International Court of Justice has dealt with about 130
cases.

COMPOSITION
The ICJ is composed of fifteen judges elected to nine-year terms by the UN General
Assembly and the UN Security Council from a list of people nominated by the national
groups in the Permanent Court of Arbitration. The election process is set out in Articles
4–19 of the ICJ statute. Elections are staggered, with five judges elected every three
years to ensure continuity within the court. Should a judge die in office, the practice has
generally been to elect a judge in a special election to complete the term.

No two judges may be nationals of the same country. According to Article 9, the
membership of the court is supposed to represent the "main forms of civilization and of
the principal legal systems of the world". Essentially, that has meant common law, civil
law and socialist law (now post-communist law).

There is an informal understanding that the seats will be distributed by geographic

regions so that there are five seats for Western countries, three for African states
(including one judge of francophone civil law, one of Anglophone common law and one
Arab), two for Eastern European states, three for Asian states and two for Latin American
and Caribbean states. For most of the court's history, the five permanent members of
the United Nations Security Council (France, Russia, China, the United Kingdom, and the
United States) have always had a judge serving, thereby occupying three of the Western
seats, one of the Asian seats and one of the Eastern European seats. Exceptions have
been China not having a judge on the court from 1967 to 1985, during which time it did
not put forward a candidate, and British judge Sir Christopher Greenwood being
withdrawn as a candidate for election for a second nine-year term on the bench in 2017,
leaving no judges from the United Kingdom on the court. Greenwood had been
supported by the UN Security Council but failed to get a majority in the UN General
Assembly. Indian judge Dalveer Bhandari instead took the seat.

Article 6 of the Statute provides that all judges should be "elected regardless of their
nationality among persons of high moral character" who are either qualified for the
highest judicial office in their home states or known as lawyers with sufficient
competence in international law. Judicial independence is dealt with specifically in
Articles 16–18. Judges of the ICJ are not able to hold any other post or act as counsel. In
practice, members of the court have their own interpretation of these rules and allow
them to be involved in outside arbitration and hold professional posts as long as there is
no conflict of interest. A judge can be dismissed only by a unanimous vote of the other
members of the court. Despite these provisions, the independence of ICJ judges has
been questioned. For example, during the Nicaragua case, the United States issued a
communiqué suggesting that it could not present sensitive material to the court because
of the presence of judges from Eastern bloc states.

Judges may deliver joint judgments or give their own separate opinions. Decisions and
Advisory Opinions are by majority, and, in the event of an equal division, the President's
vote becomes decisive, which occurred in the Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear
Weapons in Armed Conflict (Opinion requested by WHO), [1996] ICJ Reports 66. Judges
may also deliver separate dissenting opinions.

CONCLUSION
It is a mistake to evaluate the exercise of powers by all international courts in the same
manner because each court is created for a specific purpose or function and that
function shapes its powers. While all courts, by virtue of being courts, have inherent
powers derived from their judicial functions-- including the need for independence and
control over the administration of justice--each court's specific functions are coupled
with express and implied powers that are particularly important to fulfilling that
function. An understanding of the different functions and the implications of them for
the type and scope of implied powers is necessary to properly evaluate the work of the
international judiciary. This Article suggests that the functions of dispute settlement,
compliance assessment, enforcement, and advice are different from each other and
require the exercise of different powers. This Article also outlines some of those
differences, including the use of interim measures in contentious cases but not in
advisory proceedings, the different standards of proof used in different types of courts,
and the continuation of cases by compliance courts despite the death of the applicant
or, in some instances, the agreement of the parties, but it is important to acknowledge
that this has been merely an opening analysis. It should be considered an invitation to
others interested in the work of international adjudication to give more attention to the
variety of international judicial bodies and the powers they exercise.

BIBLOGRAPHY

·6 http://scholarship.law.gwu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?
article=2053&context=faculty_publications

·7 http://research.un.org/en/docs/icj

·8 https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-functions-of-the-icj