Source: https://www.ejiltalk.org/ugandas-julia-sebutinde-elected-to-the-international-court-of-justice/
Timestamp: 2018-04-26 07:41:51
Document Index: 662431821

Matched Legal Cases: ['art. 10', 'Art. 12', 'Art. 12', 'Arts 10', 'art. 12', 'art. 12', 'art. 10', 'art. 12', 'art. 10']

EJIL: Talk! – Uganda’s Julia Sebutinde Elected to the International Court of Justice
Home EJIL Analysis Uganda’s Julia Sebutinde Elected to the International Court of Justice
Published on December 14, 2011 Author: Dapo Akande
https://www.ejiltalk.org/ugandas-julia-sebutinde-elected-to-the-international-court-of-justice
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December 14, 2011 at 15:44
Dapo Akande notes: “The ICJ Statute requires that candidates obtain an absolute majority in both the Security Council and the General Assembly.” However, art. 10 of the ICJ Statute requires an “absolute majority of votes”, which is not the same as saying an absolute majority of possible votes. The practice of the GA and SC on election of judges to the ICJ results from a misinterpretation of article 10, as that provision by mentioning an ‘absolute’ majority intended to prevent a plurality or ‘first past the post’ result. Hence, if three candidates were up for one post, a candidate would need an absolute majority of votes, meaning more than 50% of the votes (i.e. a ‘simple’ majority), rather than the candidate with the most votes being considered elected. Cf. Schermers and Blokker, International Institutional Law, Fourth Revised Edition (I don’t have the new edition yet), paras. 818 and 821 (with further references to Rudzinski and Hogan).
Andre. Many thank for the comment. Do I understand you to mean that in calculating an absolute majority what we should be concerned with is NOT the absolute majority of the membership (which in the case of the GA is currently 97 out of 193 members) but rather a simple majority of votes actually cast. If you’re right then where only 185 states vote in the GA then obtaining only 93 votes would suffice. The practice of the UN has been to require the former (an absolute majority of the membership)and not the latter (an absolute majority of votes cast). I think that the UN practice is right. The UN’s Office of Legal Affairs considered this question in the opinion I referred to in my previous post on the ICJ Elections (see here at p. 174). The Office of Legal Affairs points out the practice is in line with the intention expressed in the drafting of the Statute when the drafting conference endorsed the view that : “it was necessary to retain ‘absolute’ in front of ‘majority’, since the required majority was one half of the whole membership plus one”.
Also, the view that only an absolute majority of votes cast is required is drawn, as you indicate, from the wording of Article 10 of the ICJ Statute which says “absolute majority of votes”. But note that Art. 12 which also requires an absolute majority does not say “of votes”. It just says absolute majority. Also, in Article 12 we see that the intention behind the words “absolute majority” (at least in that provision) cannot have been to prevent a plurality or first past the post. This is because the procedure stated in Art. 12 only applies where there will be one candidate for each place that needs to be filled. So in such a scenario it is impossible to have first past the post anyway and the words absolute majority is clearly intended to require an absolute majority of the membership. Given the similarity in wording (the use of the words “absoute majority”) in both Arts 10 and 12, it seems likely that they were intended to have the same meaning.
Dapo: though I take your point on art. 12, that provision is rather awkward in the sense that it speaks of an absolute majority in the context of a six member joint conference. It does make sense perhaps to require an absolute majority of the membership of that conference (considering there will be only six members all in all). Indeed, the record of the preparatory works referred to indicate that the intention was to make sure that the three members from one (General Assembly) or the other (Security Council) would not be in a position to overrule the members of the other organ (which would be possible if the vote were not calculated by reference to the membership).
However, and notwithstanding that very interesting link to the Office of Legal Affair’s memorandum, the mention in art. 12 of “absolute majority” cannot be read into art. 10, precisely because the latter adds “of votes”. In any way, when I considered this issue first I believe I read the piece by Rudzinski, who traces the developments concerned and (I think) persuasively established that this was a question of misinterpretation. Over and above that, the record of the preparatory works referred to in that memorandum relates to a discussion of what later became art. 12 rather than the formulation of what is now art. 10.