The Genesis of International Justice

Abstract

The increasing number of international courts and their specialisation and the penetration of legal positions developed at the supranational level into the practice of domestic courts raise the question of the nature of international justice and its peculiarities. The concepts of national justice and the systemic nature of international courts are well developed in the doctrine, but the issue of international justice remains under-researched. Such an analysis is particularly important because of Russia's membership of the Eurasian Economic Union and the active use of supranational court positions in domestic law enforcement, including judicial enforcement. This article examines the current and historical approaches to the understanding of justice in Russian legal theory and the views of foreign scholarship on procedural justice, which is seen as equivalent to the category of «justice». The aim of this study is to formulate a concept of justice that is free from the peculiarities of national legal systems and able to explain the processes inherent in international courts. The question of the specific features of international justice will be answered, preceded by a reflection on the definition of «international judicial body» in the context of approaches of domestic as well as European. The method of induction has made it possible to identify the specific features inherent in universal international courts as well as in courts of integration associations and, on this basis, to provide a definition for «international judicial body». A comparison of the powers vested in the Court of Justice of the Eurasian Economic Union, the range of persons having the possibility to initiate dispute resolution, the binding and enforceable nature of its acts with similar rules in the activities of the UN International Court of Justice, the European Court of Human Rights and the Court of Justice of the European Union provides empirical material for analysis of the specific features of the Eurasian dispute resolution body justice. The study concludes that the modern concept of national and international justice has its philosophical basis in the genesis of ideas about human rights and fundamental freedoms. International justice, however, is defined as the legal and procedural activity of an independent judiciary to apply the law and resolve legal conflict.