Scarcity of case law

In its six decades of history, there are only three International Court of Justice (ICJ) cases relevant to the threat of force theme. The cases cover radically different facts and the threat of force was not a central part of the deliberations. In the first case, the Corfu Channel case, threats of force were not explicitly mentioned but only implied; in the second case, the Nicaragua judgment, their invocation was of marginal importance; and in the third case, the Nuclear Weapons advisory opinion, they would push the Court to the limits of its judicial capacity.

In some other instances, states have claimed exposure to threats before the ICJ but that claim, or their cases as a whole, did not make it to the merits phase. Libya brought forward the illegality of threats in the Lockerbie proceedings, yet the parties agreed to remove it from the Court's docket in September 2003. In the NATO cases, Yugoslavia alleged that NATO member states had illegally used threats of force before and during the Kosovo intervention, but did not include this claim in its submissions. The Spanish-Canadian Fisheries Jurisdiction case, in which Spain invoked article 2(4) of the UN Charter in regard to the coerced interception of its fishing boats by Canadian patrol vessels, was dismissed on procedural grounds. The same fate befell the Greek-Turkish dispute over the Aegean continental shelf. There were also three further near misses.