International Court of Justice

• 1. Introduction

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  The International Court of Justice has heard 201 cases as of September 2025, yet it owns no police, no jail, and no army to make any country listen. In May 1947 the United Kingdom lodged the first dispute against Albania over incidents in the Corfu Channel. Since then the body colloquially known as the World Court has issued judgments that are binding and final, with no appeal, and watched powerful states simply walk away from them. It sits not in New York with the rest of the United Nations, but in the Peace Palace in The Hague. How does a court command the obedience of sovereign nations when its only real enforcer holds a veto in its own hand? Why does a judgment that is final and binding so often change nothing on the ground? And how did the world arrive at the idea that countries should sue each other before fifteen robed strangers at all?

• 2. From Arbitration To Permanence

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  Russian Tsar Nicholas II initiated the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, which drew in all the world's major powers and several smaller states. That gathering produced the first multilateral treaties on the conduct of warfare, among them the Convention for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes. The Permanent Court of Arbitration grew out of it, established in 1900 and beginning proceedings in 1902. Its arbitrators were not full-time judges; the disputing states chose them from a pool supplied by each member of the convention.

  A second Hague Peace Conference convened in 1907 and revised the earlier convention. There, the United States, Great Britain and Germany jointly proposed a permanent court whose judges would serve full-time. The delegates could not agree on how to select those judges, so the plan was shelved for a later convention. The ideas circulating at The Hague rippled outward, helping inspire the Central American Court of Justice, established in 1908 as one of the earliest regional judicial bodies. Between 1911 and 1919, further plans for an international tribunal were drafted but went unrealized.

• 3. The League's Court

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  Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations called for a Permanent Court of International Justice, charged with adjudicating disputes submitted by contesting parties and giving advisory opinions to the League. In December 1920 the League's Assembly unanimously adopted the PCIJ statute, signed and ratified the following year by a majority of members. The statute settled the old quarrel over judges by having the League's Council and Assembly elect them concurrently but independently. The new bench was meant to reflect the main forms of civilization and the principal legal systems of the world, and it took its place at the Peace Palace beside the Permanent Court of Arbitration.

  The PCIJ marked a genuine break from earlier arbitration. It was a permanent body with its own statute and rules, a standing registry that liaised with governments, and proceedings that were largely public, including pleadings, oral arguments and documentary evidence. Its statute was the first to list the sources of law it would draw upon, and those lists themselves became sources of international law. From its first session in 1922 until 1940, the court handled 29 interstate disputes and issued 27 advisory opinions, with several hundred treaties conferring jurisdiction upon it.

  The United States, despite shaping both the second Hague Peace Conference and the Paris Peace Conference, never joined the League and never joined the court. Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt all supported membership, but none secured the two-thirds Senate majority a treaty required. Several American nationals served as PCIJ judges all the same. The court peaked in 1933, then declined as international tension and isolationism grew. It held its last public session in December 1939 and issued its final orders in February 1940.

• 4. Rebuilding After The War

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  In 1942 the United States and United Kingdom jointly declared support for an international court after the war. The following year the U.K. chaired the Inter-Allied Committee, a panel of jurists drawn from around the world. Its 1944 report recommended that any new court base its statute on the PCIJ, keep an advisory jurisdiction, make acceptance of its jurisdiction voluntary, and handle judicial rather than political matters.

  The Moscow conference of 1943 brought a joint declaration from China, the USSR, the U.K. and the U.S. on the need for a general international organization founded on the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states. The Dumbarton Oaks proposal of October 1944 called for an intergovernmental organization that would include an international court. In April 1945-44 jurists met in Washington, D.C. to draft a statute so similar to the PCIJ's that some questioned whether a new court was needed at all. At the San Francisco Conference, running from the 25th of April to the 26th of June 1945 with 50 countries present, the decision was made to create an entirely new court as a principal organ of the United Nations.

  Continuity was preserved with care. The PCIJ convened a final time in October 1945 and resolved to transfer its archives to its successor. Its judges all resigned on the 31st of January 1946, and the new court elected its first members that February. In April 1946 the PCIJ was formally dissolved, and the ICJ elected as its first president José Gustavo Guerrero of El Salvador, who had served as the last president of the PCIJ. The new Registry was drawn mainly from the old one.

• 5. Fifteen Judges

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  Article 3 of the statute forbids any two judges from holding the same nationality, so the fifteen members of the bench each carry a different passport. The General Assembly and the Security Council elect them to nine-year terms from a list nominated by national groups in the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Elections are staggered, with five judges chosen every three years to keep continuity. Article 9 requires that the membership represent the main forms of civilization and the principal legal systems of the world, read to include common law, civil law, socialist law and Islamic law.

  An informal understanding parcels the seats by region: five for Western countries, three for African states, 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 Security Council have always had a judge present, occupying three Western seats, one Asian and one Eastern European. The pattern has broken at times. China put forward no candidate from 1967 to 1985 and went unrepresented. In 2017 British judge Sir Christopher Greenwood, supported by the Security Council, failed to win a majority in the General Assembly; Indian judge Dalveer Bhandari took the seat instead, leaving no British judge on the bench.

  Article 16 bars judges from any political or administrative function or any other professional occupation, and Article 17 keeps them off any case they once handled as agent, counsel or advocate. A judge can be dismissed only by a unanimous vote of the others. Even so, independence has been questioned: during the Nicaragua case the United States suggested it could not present sensitive material because of judges from the Soviet bloc. In the court's first 77 years, only five women were elected, prompting former UN Special Rapporteur Philip Alston to urge states to take representation seriously. In 2023, judges elected to take office from 2024 included no Russian, the first time Russia or its predecessor the Soviet Union would have no member on the bench.

• 6. Borrowed And Borrowed Again

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  Article 31 of the statute lets a party to a contentious case appoint one additional person to sit as a judge for that case alone, if none of its nationals already sits on the bench. As many as seventeen judges may then hear a single case. The arrangement looks odd beside any domestic court, but its purpose is to coax states into submitting disputes at all. A government that knows it will have a judicial officer offering local knowledge may feel readier to accept the court's reach. These ad hoc judges usually, though not always, vote for the state that appointed them, so in practice they tend to cancel each other out.

  The court normally sits as a full bench, but Articles 26 to 29 allow smaller chambers of three or five judges. Article 26 contemplates two kinds: chambers for special categories of cases, and ad hoc chambers for particular disputes. In 1993 a special chamber was created for environmental matters, though it has never been used. Ad hoc chambers appear more often. In the Gulf of Maine case between Canada and the United States, the parties made clear they would withdraw unless the court named judges acceptable to them. Critics warn that chamber judgments may carry less authority, or narrow the reading of universal international law shaped by many cultures and legal traditions.

• 7. Consent And Its Limits

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  Article 93 of the UN Charter makes every UN member automatically a party to the court's statute, and non-members can join too, as Switzerland did in 1948 and Nauru in 1988 before entering the UN. Being a party, though, does not hand the court power over a state's disputes. The governing principle is consent. Under Article 36 there are four foundations for jurisdiction: a special agreement in which parties refer a case directly, a compromissory clause in a binding treaty, an optional clause declaration accepting jurisdiction in advance, and the transfer of jurisdiction that once belonged to the PCIJ.

  Each path has its weaknesses. During the Iran hostage crisis, Iran refused to take part in a case the United States brought under a clause of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, and ignored the judgment. Optional declarations, sometimes mislabeled compulsory, are voluntary and often loaded with reservations. As of January 2018, seventy-four states had a declaration in force, up from sixty-six in February 2011, yet among the permanent Security Council members only the United Kingdom had one. Australia modified its declaration in 2002 to exclude maritime boundary disputes, most likely to head off a challenge from East Timor, which gained independence two months later.

  Jurisdiction can also rest on tacit consent, where a respondent accepts the court's authority by pleading on the merits. The 1949 Corfu Channel case turned on this: the court held that a letter from Albania stating it submitted to the court was enough to grant jurisdiction. Beyond final judgments, Article 41 lets the court order interim measures to protect a party's rights, binding so long as prima facie jurisdiction is satisfied. In the Frontier Dispute case, both Burkina Faso and Mali asked the court for such measures.

• 8. Power Without Enforcement

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  Article 94 of the UN Charter binds every member to comply with decisions in cases involving it, and sends non-compliance to the Security Council for enforcement. The trap is plain. A judgment against one of the five permanent members or its allies can be killed by that member's veto. After the court ruled that the United States' covert war against Nicaragua violated international law, the United States withdrew from compulsory jurisdiction in 1986 and later used its veto when Nicaragua brought the noncompliance before the council. The court had ordered the United States, with only the American judge dissenting, to cease its unlawful use of force and pay war reparations.

  The boundary between court and council was tested in 1992 in the Pan Am case. Libya sought provisional measures against the threat of sanctions by the United Kingdom and United States, but those sanctions had been authorized by the Security Council. By eleven votes to five, the court declined to order the measures, holding that under Article 103 of the Charter, obligations under the Charter take precedence over other treaties. It later declared the application admissible in 1998, and the parties settled out of court in 2003. In the Nicaragua case the court said there is no necessary inconsistency between Security Council action and its own adjudication, yet where conflict arises the balance tilts toward the council.

  When it does rule, the court applies international law as set out in Article 38: international conventions, international custom and the general principles of law recognized by civilized nations. Article 59 makes clear that the common law notion of precedent does not bind it; a decision binds only the parties to that controversy, though the court often cites its own past rulings. The largest case in its history was not a dispute between two states at all. On the 23rd of July 2025 the court issued an advisory opinion on state obligations regarding climate change, requested by the General Assembly, after hearing 99 countries and more than 12 intergovernmental organizations over two weeks in December 2024.