Acceptance, and Withdrawal or Denial, of World Court Jurisdiction: Some Recent Trends as to Jurisdiction

Abstract

The political attacks being mounted today against international organisation—the United Nations General Assembly, and especially UNESCO—are paralleled by some differences and challenges to the International Court of Justice, and this on the part of some of the Court's erstwhile most enthusiastic supporters. It used to be almost an act of political faith for Western, or Western-influenced, para-professional legal associations, meeting in the immediate post-War era and up to the 1960s, to reaffirm their support for the principle of international adjudication as the prime method of peaceful settlement of international disputes, and for the acceptance by all States of the compulsory jurisdiction of the World Court as the most affirmative and concrete way of demonstrating their endorsement of that principle. It was once a key element in the instructions of Western delegations to international legal conferences to insist upon the primacy of judicial settlement in any formal legal affirmation of the principle of peaceful settlement and in any listing of the alternative modes of its exercise.