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10 - The Court's role in relation to international organizations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2009

Vaughan Lowe
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Malgosia Fitzmaurice
Affiliation:
Universiteit van Amsterdam
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Summary

To have the principal judicial organ of the United Nations more often employed with respect to the legal components of situations with which the United Nations is concerned would, quite apart from its possible contribution to solving a dispute or situation, also do immense good for international law.

Speech by Sir Robert Yewdall Jennings to the UN General Assembly: UN Doc. A/46/PV.44 at 6–23 (1991)

The integration of the Court into the United Nations system as its ‘principal judicial organ’ conveys little of what, conceptually, it was designed to achieve. One aim would be that it should be the normal means of settling legal disputes between member states, and this aim finds some reflection in articles 36(3), 93 and 94 of the Charter. A quite different aim would be that it should give legal advice to the UN organs as regards the performance of their functions, with the emphasis being on the needs of those organs for this assistance. A third, and again quite different, aim would be to have the Court act as an organ of judicial review, with the emphasis being on the need of member states to ensure that the UN organs confined themselves to those powers that had been conferred on them by the constituent treaty.

Clearly, article 96 of the Charter, and chapter IV of the Court's Statute, adopt the second concept – the advisory role – and not the third.

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Chapter
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Fifty Years of the International Court of Justice
Essays in Honour of Sir Robert Jennings
, pp. 181 - 192
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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