in this lesson we're going to look at the third of the major organs of the United Nation this being the principal judicial organ of the United Nation that being the international court of justice so we have spoken about the court of justice before and we're also going to focus on what the court of justice is in in future lessons as well when we start to look at the regulation of Human Rights uh and all these kinds of things from a Judicial perspective but this lesson is just going to take an introduction as to what the court of justice is and what kind of cases are brought before the international court of justice and the extent to which they're effective in doing so in adjudicating such cases so the icga is the successor to the League of Nations as permanent court of justice and they share a lot of similarities firstly one of them being that they share a geographical similarity in the sense they both are in the same place the peace Palace at the Hague um they also share some kind of jurisprudential similarities in the sense that if you were to study international law in today's context if you're somebody who is um looking to do law at University for example or you might have a keen interest in international law you might have been watching these lessons or doing geopolitics for a level politics and thought international law is very interesting and I I kind of maybe want to engage with it in a bit more detail as more of an expert in the future you'll note that when you study international law you don't just study cases from the international court of justice there are very important cases and seminal cases that had been established by the permanent court of justice so for example the Lotus case if you want to see that in more detail the international court of justice though as it exists today is also the principal judicial organ of the United Nations it adjudicates decisions on contentious issues between states so for example if one state wants to sue another state for whatever reason there are plenty of different examples of this being the case so for example I'll give some famous illustrations if you want to look into them in more detail you have the North Sea continental shelf cases from uh from the 1960s you have the Nicaragua case between the United States and the country of Nicaragua you have uh States uh relating to other issues such as Maritime delimitation which sort of is related to um the North Sea Continental self cases you have the Bosnian and Serbian cases relating to genocide in the 1990s all of these things are cases that are known as contentious cases because they are where one state sues another state or where two states go to dispute settlement or multiple States go to dispute settlement and this is a certain specific kind of jurisdiction that the international court of justice has and this is known as the contentious jurisdiction of the icj on top of it having contentious jurisdiction the icj also delivers what are known as advisory opinions on complex matters of international law so usually the general assembly as we've mentioned in previous lessons will ask a question that is of complicated issues relating to international law and these are known as advisory opinions and it is given as part of the icj's advisory jurisdiction now an example of advisory jurisdiction and advisory opinions is the advisory opinion from the 1990s on the legality of the use or and threats of nuclear weapons now this was a case that essentially the the assembly asked to what extent is the use or the threat of use of nuclear weapons within the context of an armed conflict uh in violation of or maybe not in violation of the laws of war the the laws of international humanitarian law you might think that the result of that case would be that they are illegal in international humanitarian law that you can't use uh you can't use nuclear weapons well the icj in the advisor opinion disagreed they said that there is nothing in the sort of broader context of the laws of war or International humanitarian law whatever you want to call it that says explicitly that nuclear weapons are banned and cannot be used so long as you use them within the context of following the rules of War so you can't use them for example against civilians or you can't use them against pows you can't use them against targets that are not necessarily proportional so there is obviously a lot of limitation in being able to fit it in line with the laws of war but if you are using a nuclear weapon and you do so within the broader context of the laws of war there's nothing necessarily illegal about it that's an example of an advisory opinion that was issued by the icj for more on that you can just Google I believe it's the advisor opinion on the use and threat of nuclear weapons from the 1990s so let's go into advisory jurisdiction in a little bit more detail because really it refers to other organs of the United Nations most often the general assembly asking a legal question like I've said for example the previous case is it illegal for states to use in weapons within International humanitarian law uh the icj says there's nothing in international humanitarian law that says no so essentially the answer is open to interpretation will then operate a question as a case and look to provide an advisory opinion on the matter now one of the things that is interesting about the advisory jurisdiction compared to that of the contentious jurisdiction is that advisory opinions are not binding on two states per se because there isn't any kind of contention that exists so in the instance of contentious jurisdiction if one state sues another state and the icj rules in favor of one of these states whichever one is in the in the rights within law then that is binding onto the states that are part of that uh dispute but when it comes to advisory opinions there aren't any states really involved and so it's a it's a question of law so there aren't really any kind of binding authority to them but what they do do is provide a basis for where the international court of justice would stand on a particular legal matter so let's go back to that advisory opinion on the use of nuclear weapons so while it's not binding onto anything because there's not anything really for it to bind upon if there was a contentious jurisdiction brought whereby for example there's an armed conflict that's going on and maybe one of the sides decides to use nuclear weapons against the other and so that country will then sue the other country in the icj for the use of that nuclear weapon well we know already on the basis of the advisory opinion that where the icj would stand on that matter they would stand on the matter of saying well if this use of nuclear weapons doesn't violate all the other rules of the uh of the laws of war then there's no reason to suggest that they are going to be there's something inherent in the use of nuclear weapons that makes them illegal in and of themselves so you could come to the conclusion that while they are not binding they show us where the icj would stand on a particular legal matter and so they are sort of binding in the sense that they they give us an indication of what the icj would actually say if it was a contentious issue now in cases of contentious jurisdiction like I said States will bring issues of international law against other states for the icj to adjudicate now there's technically no real limitation on what states can sue other states for there are plenty of examples of all kinds of cases ranging from the very Broad in terms of the use of force or different territorial legitimacy jurisdiction questions questions related to statehood questions relating to like I've said in many instances Maritime the limitation so where the the maritime borders and where the uh where the the the the territorial sea of each of the different states actually uh land and they also have the issues relating to the actions of states in other states so for example the Nicaragua case is is a good one on that and they have all kinds of uh there's all kinds of things that can be adjudicated at the icj now like I said uh they range from uh rather suggestively menial questions such as Maritime delimitation uh two disputes of questions of genocide like the Bosnia Serbia cases from the 1990s a question of genocide in fact actually uh the the icj has had a case recently on the question of genocide the extent to which genocide is taking place in the Donetsk and lahance region by the state of Ukraine which was a claim that was presented by the Russian Federation they said there is a they are committing genocide the icj said no they're not because they're because they're not the the major issue with this uh with the icj in in this instances in order for it to be effective because we don't live in a kind of domestic setting where there is this sort of World Police that is a a key Sovereign of international law we have to rely on the states to accept the dispute the result of the dispute if if the state doesn't accept that results of a dispute for whatever reason there's not really anything the icj can do they can just they can't send the police in the the World Police to go go in and force the state to do anything about it and so we have instances where there is the acceptance of a judgment so in 2013 Thailand accepted a judgment from the icj on the matter of whether or not Cambodia owned a specific Temple the Priya vinya Temple Alvin here Temple um and this was uh the requirement in this case was that Thailand withdraw troops from the region and they accepted this judgment and did so accordingly on the other hand we have another instance here where there are situations where the icj judgments are found and a case is is adjudicated and decided but there may be a lack of enforcement so for example in 2019 the icj had ruled that the Chago Silas had been illegally held by the United Kingdom the United Kingdom argued that the British ownership were necessary for their their own personal defense and security and as a result the decision um they argued that the decision was only advisory and so they didn't have any obligation on the part of uh the uh one of the members of the contentious cases to actually uphold the decision that was brought now one of the things that's very interesting about this specific case is very very recently I believe within the last couple of days at the time of recording I'm recording this on the 6th of November 2022 um there have been new rounds of negotiations as to the legality or or who owns the chagos islands and they've been in negotiations moving as to the UK's handing over the chagos islands to uh to to other individuals so if you want to look into more detail on this particular case then there is very new and very recent um recent development and news on that issue so stay tuned for that