Revisiting the Role of International Courts as Agencies of World Peace: Towards a Needed Culture of Judicial Resolution of Disputes
Chile Eboe-Osuji*
“A trial before an international court must not be an alternative to war; it must be made a substantial and complete substitute for war.” —Salmon O. Levinson
Recent decades, and particularly the last few years, have placed the world at the front seat of live horror shows that enacted, in the name of war, decimation of human lives and their support structures and cultural properties. This flagrant scoff both underscored the degree of the veritable onslaught on the guardrails of international law and order and often provoked questions about the enduring sustainability of that legal system. International law can survive this recent shock to its framework, but it requires inculcating in international relations a culture of adjudication of disputes rather than deprecate that approach as merely a strategy of “lawfare” through which military weaklings seek to inherit the earth. The original dream of influential voices of public policy—including certain presidents of the United States—who advocated for the establishment of a permanent court of international justice was always to see adjudication serve as a complete substitute for war. Unfortunately, the use of the new system of international justice, when finally actualized in the early 1920s, was not translated into a new culture that should have displaced the old habit of using military force to settle international disputes. That failure inured to the ease with which states— especially those able to muster terrifying arsenal— instinctually relapsed into the reflex of military force, especially when pride and emotion were aroused. A new culture of adjudication of disputes is needed in a revised approach to international law. This, in turn, requires the International Court of Justice to abandon its shortsighted jurisprudence on existence of a dispute which in effect discourages use of the court for the settlement of disputes.
* Former President of the International Criminal Court; Distinguished International Jurist, Toronto Metropolitan University. This essay is based on a keynote address delivered at the commencement of the 2024 Friedmann Conference at Columbia Law School on April 1, 2024.