Unit 4: the sources of international law

TEXT 1. THE SOURCES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

Part I

Customary law and conventional law are primary sources of international law. Customary international law results when states follow certain practices generally and consistently out of a sense of legal obligation. Recently the customary law was codified in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.

Conventional international law derives from international agreements and may take any form that the contracting parties agree upon. Agreements may be made in respect to any matter except to the extent that the agreement conflicts with the rules of international law incorporating basic standards of international conduct or the obligations of a member state under the Charter of the United Nations. International agreements create law for the parties of the agreement. They may also lead to the creation of customary international law when they are intended for adherence generally and are in fact widely accepted. Customary law and law made by international agreement have equal authority as international law. Parties may assign higher priority to one of the sources by agreement. However, some rules of international law are recognized by international community as peremptory, permitting no derogation. Such rules can be changed or modified only by a subsequent peremptory norm of international law.

General principles common to systems of national law is a secondary source of international law. There are situations where neither conventional nor customary international law can be applicable. In this case a general principle may be invoked as a rule of international law because it is a general principle common to the major legal systems of the world and not inappropriate for international claims.

Part II

Article 38 of the Statute of the International Court of Justice, considered by some as the "Bible of the Poor" of those who seek quick answers despite of the complexity of international relations, constitutes nevertheless a good starting point for the understanding of the sources of international law. According to this article, international law finds its origin in the following three sources:

· international conventions of general or particular nature;

· international custom, as evidence of a general practice accepted as law;

· the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations.

Most international law experts would rush to add the "unilateral acts" to these three sources of law and to declare that Article 38 of the Statute has omitted to mention these unilateral acts for which the United Nations' International Law Commission (ILC) has elaborated Guiding Principles in 2006. Contrary to this opinion, other international lawyers would maintain that these unilateral acts constitute specific expressions of the will of States leading eventually to agreements which are then governed by the rules applicable to international conventions.

Finally, the idea of justice and equity originating in the philosophy of natural law is not to be discarded as a source of international law, since it is the opinion of the International Court of Justice itself that whatever the legal argumentation of the judge, his or her decisions have to be just and in that sense must correspond to justice and equity. Moreover, the judges of the International Court of Justice are expressly authorized to decide a case ex aequo et bono, if the parties agree thereto, i.e. to found their judgements on arguments of equity (Article 38 (2) of the Statute of the International Court of Justice).

International treaty law as codified by Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties of 1969 is open for considerations of justice too. Moreover, the concept of "jus cogens" seems also to be an angle of incidence for natural law ideas.

Since, on the basis of their sovereignty and therefore independence, the equality of all States constitutes the theoretical foundation of international relations and although public international law, by definition, does not belong to civil law, international legal debates are often reminiscent of the discussions known in the latter area, in particular in the context of the law of contracts.

However, the analogy with the law of contract ends where measures are taken on the basis of Chapter VII of the Charter of the United Nations. Although they are foreseen in an international treaty - in particular by Article 25 of the Charter - these measures deserve to be highlighted because of the legal obligations they impose to the whole world, their political significance and the remarkable development they have undergone since the Gulf War of 1991. The measures taken by the Security Council and which are expressly based on Chapter VII of the Charter encompass not only military as well as economic sanctions against:

· certain States (Ethiopia, Eritrea, Iraq, Yougoslavia, Sierra Leone etc.);

· or insurgents (Angola's UNITA, see resolution 1173/1998 of 12 June 1998) or even political parties in government (the Afghan faction of the Taliban, see res.1267/1999 of 15 October 1999);

but also:

· the creation of special tribunals to prosecute war crimes or crimes against humanity in the territory of the former Yugoslavia (res. 827/1993 of 25 May 1993) and in Ruanda (res. 955/1994 of 8 November 1994);

· or of special administrative zones like in East Timor (see res. 1272/1999 of 25 October 1999) or in Kosovo (see res.1244/1999 of 10 June 1999);

as well as:

· measures against terrorism in general (res. 1373/2001 of 28 September 2001).

These sources of international law are supplemented by two subsidiary means for the determination of rules of law (Article 38 (1) (d) of the Statute), i.e. by:

· judicial decisions (although even the decisions of the International Court of Justice have binding force only between the parties and in respect of the particular cases submitted to the Court - Article 59 of the Statute) and

· the teachings of the most highly qualified publicists of the various nations.