International Court of Justice
All information below from court website:
http://www.icj-cij.org/
The International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has its seat in The Hague, is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations.
Today, the Court is open to practically every State in the world:
ICJ, to which no case can be submitted unless both applicant and respondent are States
A case can only be submitted to the Court with the consent of the States concerned
Jurisdiction ratione personae is not, however, in itself enough. A fundamental principle governing the settlement of international disputes is that the jurisdiction of an international tribunal depends in the last resort on the consent of the States concerned. Accordingly, no sovereign State can be made a party in proceedings before the Court unless it has in some manner or other consented thereto. It must have agreed that the dispute or the class of disputes in question should be dealt with by the Court. It is this agreement that determines the jurisdiction of the Court so far as the particular dispute is concerned the Court's jurisdiction ratione materiae. It is true that Article 36 of the Charter provides that the Security Council, which may at any stage of a dispute recommend appropriate procedures or methods of adjustment, is to "take into consideration that legal disputes should as a general rule be referred by the parties to the International Court of Justice". In the Corfu Channel case, however, the ICJ did not consider a recommendation by the Security Council to this effect sufficient to confer jurisdiction on the Court independently of the wishes of the parties to the dispute.
The first possibility envisaged here is where the parties bilaterally agree to submit an already existing dispute to the ICJ and thus to recognize its jurisdiction over that particular case.
It can also happen that a dispute is brought before the Court while at the time of the institution of the proceedings only one of the disputing States has validly recognized its jurisdiction over the case in question and the other has not, and that this latter State recognizes the Court's jurisdiction subsequently; this is a fairly rare situation and is known as forum prorogatum (*Mavrommatis Jerusalem Concessions, *Rights of Minorities in Upper Silesia, Corfu Channel). It has also happened ten times that a State has instituted proceedings in the ICJ whilst recognizing that the opposing party has not recognized the Court's jurisdiction and inviting it to do so: hitherto, this has always met with a negative response.
A third means of consent to the Court's jurisdiction is described in paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 36 of the Statute:
"2. The States parties to the present Statute may at any time declare that they recognize as compulsory ipso facto and without special agreement, in relation to any other State accepting the same obligation, the jurisdiction of the Court in all legal disputes concerning: (a) the interpretation of a treaty; (b) any question of international law; (c) the existence of any fact which, if established, would constitute a breach of an international obligation; (d) the nature or extent of the reparation to be made for the breach of an international obligation.
3. The declarations referred to above may be made unconditionally or on condition of reciprocity on the part of several or certain States, or for a certain time."
States recognizing
the compulsory jurisdiction of the Court
(with or without reservations) July 1996
Australia |
Guinea-Bissau |
Norway |
States that have been parties in cases from 1946 to July 1996 |
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Albania |
France Germany |
Nicaragua
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Examples of treaties or conventions conferring
jurisdiction on the ICJ
Convention on the prevention and punishment of the crime of genocide
Universal copyright convention
Single convention on narcotic drugs
International convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination
Convention on the suppression of the unlawful seizure of aircraft
Convention for the suppression of unlawful acts against the safety of civil aviation
International convention against the taking of hostages
United Nations convention against illicit traffic in narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances