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Dalhousie Law Journal

Hermann Mosler

Keywords

International Court of Justice, present stage, development, role, function, present situation, achievement, deficiencies, judicial settlement of international disputes

Abstract

The object of this study is not to give an outline on the role and function of the International Court of Justice in general but to evaluate its present situation. This is quite a different subject although for this purpose it will be indispensable to compare achievement reached by the Court with the role assigned to it at the time of its foundation as part of the basic structure of the United Nations, the legal organization of the international community. Reminding at the very beginning, of deficiencies actually existing, I do not want to intimate that the problems with which judicial settlement of international disputes is confronted are due to the Court, either entirely or in its major part. The principal difficulty stems from the fact that adjudication of disputes by courts is today, for various reasons, less popular in the international society than other means of settling conflicting interests. "The International Court of Justice shall be the principal judicial organ of the United Nations." This is the wording of Article 92 of the Charter. The Court is the only judicial institution to which all the States in the world have access. Its function is not restricted to the members of the United Nations. The Charter constitutes it as the general Court of the international community as a whole, non-member States being admitted to submit their disputes to the Court either through becoming a party to its Statute (which forms an integral part of the Charter) on conditions determined by the General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Security Council,1 or by making particular or general declarations of accepting the jurisdiction of the Court under a resolution of the Security Council as early as 1946.

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