The PERMANENT COURT of INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE
Autor: Vasco de Jesus | Publicado: 2008-02-24T20:33:00-08:00


The work of the two Hague Peace Conferences and the ideas they inspired in statesmen and jurists had some influence on the creation of the Central American Court of Justice, which operated from 1908 to 1918, as well as on the various plans and proposals submitted between 1911 and 1919 both by national and international bodies and by governments for the establishment of an international judicial tribunal, which culminated in the creation of the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) within the framework of the new international system set up after the end of the First World War.Article 14 of the Covenant of the League of Nations gave the Council of the League responsibility for formulating plans for the establishment of a Permanent Court of International Justice, such a court to be competent not only to hear and determine any dispute of an international character submitted to it by the parties to the dispute, but also to give an advisory opinion upon any dispute or question referred to it by the Council or by the Assembly. It remained for the League Council to take the necessary action to give effect to Article 14. At its second session early in 1920, the Council appointed an Advisory Committee of Jurists to submit a report on the establishment of the PCIJ. The committee sat in The Hague, under the chairmanship of Baron Descamps ( Belgium). In August 1920, a report containing a draft scheme was submitted to the Council, which, after examining it and making certain amendments, laid it before the First Assembly of the League of Nations, which opened at Geneva in November of that year. The Assembly instructed its Third Committee to examine the question of the Court’s constitution. In December 1920, after an exhaustive study by a subcommittee, the Committee submitted a revised draft to the Assembly, which unanimously adopted it. This was the Statute of the PCIJ.The Assembly took the view that a vote alone would not be sufficient to establish the PCIJ and that each State represented in the Assembly would formally have to ratify the Statute. In a resolution of 13 December 1920, it called upon the Council to submit to the Members of the League of Nations a protocol adopting the Statute and decided that the Statute should come into force as soon as the protocol had been ratified by a majority of Member States. The protocol was opened for signature on 16 December. By the time of the next meeting of the Assembly, in September 1921, a majority of the Members of the League had signed and ratified the protocol. The Statute thus entered into force. It was to be revised only once, in 1929, the revised version coming into force in 1936. Among other things, the new Statute resolved the previously insurmountable problem of the election of the members of a permanent international tribunal by providing that the judges were to be elected concurrently but independently by the Council and the Assembly of the League, and that it should be borne in mind that those elected “should represent the main forms of civilization and the principal legal systems of the world”. Simple as this solution may now seem, in 1920 it was a considerable achievement to have devised it. The first elections were held on 14 September 1921. Following approaches by the Netherlands Government in the spring of 1919, it was decided that the PCIJ should have its permanent seat in the Peace Palace in The Hague, which it would share with the Permanent Court of Arbitration. It was accordingly in the Peace Palace that on 30 January 1922 the Court’s preliminary session devoted to the elaboration of the Court’s Rules opened, and it was there too that its inaugural sitting was held on 15 February 1922, with the Dutch jurist Bernard C. J. Loder as President.The PCIJ was thus a working reality. The great advance it represented in the history of international legal proceedings can be appreciated by considering the following: 1) Unlike arbitral tribunals, the PCIJ was a permanently constituted body governed by its own Statute and Rules of Procedure, fixed beforehand and binding on parties having recourse to the Court; 2) It had a permanent Registry which, inter alia, served as a channel of communication with governments and international bodies; 3) Its proceedings were largely public and provision was made for the publication in due course of the pleadings, of verbatim records of the sittings and of all documentary evidence submitted to it; 4) The permanent tribunal thus established was now able to set about gradually developing a constant practice and maintaining a certain continuity in its decisions, thereby enabling it to make a greater contribution to the development of international law; 5) In principle the PCIJ was accessible to all States for the judicial settlement of their international disputes and they were able to declare beforehand that for certain classes of legal disputes they recognized the Court’s jurisdiction as compulsory in relation to other States accepting the same obligation. This system of optional acceptance of the jurisdiction of the Court was the most that it was then possible to obtain; 6) The PCIJ was empowered to give advisory opinions upon any dispute or question referred to it by the League of Nations Council or Assembly; 6) The Court’s Statute specifically listed the sources of law it was to apply in deciding contentious cases and giving advisory opinions, without prejudice to the power of the Court to decide a case ex aequo et bono if the parties so agreed; 8) It was more representative of the international community and of the major legal systems of the world than any other international tribunal had ever been before it.Although the Permanent Court of International Justice was brought into being through, and by, the League of Nations, it was nevertheless not a part of the League. There was a close association between the two bodies, which found expression inter alia in the fact that the League Council and Assembly periodically elected the Members of the Court and that both Council and Assembly were entitled to seek advisory opinions from the Court, but the latter never formed an integral part of the League, just as the Statute never formed part of the Covenant. In particular, a Member State of the League of Nations was not by this fact alone automatically a party to the Court’s Statute.Between 1922 and 1940 the PCIJ dealt with 29 contentious cases between States and delivered 27 advisory opinions. At the same time several hundred treaties, conventions and declarations conferred jurisdiction upon it over specified classes of disputes. Any doubts that might thus have existed as to whether a permanent international judicial tribunal could function in a practical and effective manner were thus dispelled. The Court’s value to the international community was demonstrated in a number of different ways, in the first place by the development of a true judicial technique. This found expression in the Rules of Court, which the PCIJ originally drew up in 1922 and subsequently revised on three occasions, in 1926, 1931 and 1936. There was also the PCIJ’s Resolution concerning the Judicial Practice of the Court, adopted in 1931 and revised in 1936, which laid down the internal procedure to be applied during the Court’s deliberations on each case. In addition, whilst helping to resolve some serious international disputes, many of them consequences of the First World War, the decisions of the PCIJ at the same time often clarified previously unclear areas of international law or contributed to its development.For more information on the Permanent Court of International Justice, please see the "PCIJ" pages on their website. (Adapted from:&lt; http://www.icj-cij.org/ &gt; on February 22, 2008).