Abstract
The law, including international law, is subject to continuous change. It can be adapted to changing circumstances through formal amendments of or additions to existing norms and practices. It can also be changed through the conduct of international institutions that is not within their legally defined competencies, provided - it will be argued - that the unauthorised conduct (a) is not expressly forbidden by existing rules of international law, and (b) is accepted or condoned by a cross-section of the international community of states. The creation by the Security Council of the United Nations of ad hoc international criminal tribunals, for example, cannot even with a stretch of the imagination be justified on the basis of the powers of the Council stipulated in the UN Charter. However, their creation was applauded by the nations of the world as a feasible and practical way of responding to the atrocities of the early 1990's in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda. The creation of international criminal tribunals by the Security Council has thus come to be accepted as a new rule of international law. The same reasoning is applied to the newly acquired competence of NATO forces to intervene militarily on humanitarian grounds as exemplified by the NATO bombing campaign of 1999 in Serbia, while not one of the NATO countries was being attacked or under threat of an attack, and the competence of States to attack terrorist groups in a foreign country if the government of that country is either unwilling or unable to prevent the ongoing acts of terror violence.
 
Highlights
The law is not static but is subject to continuous change
Two examples will suffice to prove the point, namely (a) the creation of ad hoc criminal tribunals by the Security Council of the United Nations, and (b) the military intervention of forces of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) in Serbia to put an end to the persecution of Kosovar Albanians by the repressive regime of Slobodan Milošević
Bosnia was not a state at the time, and since only states are under an obligation to comply with Chapter VII resolutions of the Security Council there was no means, according to Rubin, for compelling the authorities of that region to comply with demands for the surrender of suspects to the Tribunal
Summary
The law is not static but is subject to continuous change. This applies to international law as much as it does to the municipal law of any state. Bosnia was not a state at the time, and since only states are under an obligation to comply with Chapter VII resolutions of the Security Council there was no means, according to Rubin, for compelling the authorities of that region to comply with demands for the surrender of suspects to the Tribunal.23 These more practical, time- and place-oriented, problems need not be further explored for the purposes of the present survey, except perhaps for noting that a permanent international criminal tribunal can be constituted in a manner that would avoid such contingent discrepancies inherent in the constraints of Security Council control. Try suspects of the February 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik al-Hariri.
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