International politics and international justice: Unity in diversity?

Abstract

This paper discusses the interaction between the United Nations Or ganization and its principal legal organ?the International Court of Justice (ICJ)?and determines the political implications of the Court's status as an independent judicial body. The International Court of Justice was created to perform a dual func tion?as an agency of the United Nations and as an organ of international law. In its latter manifestation, the Court renders judgments, and in its former, gives advisory opinions to the international community through the United Nations. Presumably, when the ICJ was established, it was not en visaged that these dual functions would cause a conflict of interest between the status of the Court as an independent judicial organ and its role as a component of the United Nations. In any event, its predecessor, the Per manent Court of International Justice, had seemingly no problems in ren dering advisory opinions to the League of Nations and pronouncing judgments in contentious litigation between States. During the past few decades, however, relations between the United Nations and the ICJ have become increasingly close, creating a certain arcane ambivalence between the two functions of the Court, which some would call an organic overlap of interests. There are three possible ways in which the perceived conflict of in terests could be approached. Firstly, the international community could "live with" the present ambivalence; secondly, it could always rigidly de marcate clearly the two functions; and, thirdly, the ICJ could become a United Nations court. A common denominator which binds these three approaches is the way in which principles of public international law that may apply to the status of the ICJ are interpreted. There are two alternative ways in which international law could be interpreted to underscore the role of the ICJ within the UN system. The first alternative would be to favour