The role of international courts’ decisions in the system of sources of international financial law

Abstract

The paper deals with the analysis of the legal nature of international courts’ decisions and their impact on the international financial legal order. The author claims that decisions of international courts, creating no new international legal financial norms, act as an additional source of international financial law, having no autonomy, and in combination with other sources of international law, performs the following functions: 1) regulatory-prescriptive (via opinio juris of existing traditions in interstate practice in the financial sphere transforming them into international customary law); 2) regulatory-affirming (confirming the legal nature of the international agreement between the subjects of international financial legal relations which caused a disputable situation). The judicial practice on financial issues and specificity of functioning of such judicial institutions as the Permanent Court of International Justice, the International Court of Justice, the CIS Economic Court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, the Court of Justice of the Central African Economic and Monetary Community, etc. are examined. The features of the provisions of international agreements on financial issues regarding the procedure for resolving disputes between the parties of the agreement about its implementation are analyzed. The paper explores particularities of the origin and development of the idea of the creation of an international financial court. Amid modern processes of the rapid growth of the amount of cross-border financial flows in the context of globalization, which is the consequence of the implementation of numerous international financial agreements, the idea of creation of an international financial court, which was first suggested in 1935, due to the complexity of legal nature of interstate financial disputes, is an objective necessity. The following features intrinsic to decisions of international courts (including decisions on financial issues) have been identified: 1) locality (binding only on the parties involved in the case, and only in the current case); 2) situatedness and unprompted appearance; 3) impartiality (due to the judges’ lack of political interest); 4) authority (international courts include generally recognized experts in international law).