KEYNOTE SPEECH OF JUDGE ABDULQAWI A. YUSUF,
PRESIDENT OF THE INTERNATIONAL COURT OF JUSTICE
INSTITUT DE DROIT INTERNATIONAL,
THE HAGUE, 26 AUGUST 2019
Your Royal Highness Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands,
Excellencies,
Chères consoeurs,
Chers confrères,
1. I would like to extend to you a very warm welcome to the Peace Palace and the
International Court of Justice. It is a great honour for me to address the Institut here at the
International Court of Justice, exactly twenty years after my election as an Associate Member at the
Berlin session.
2. At the entry gates of the Peace Palace, you were discretely welcomed by four bronze
medallions adorned with personifications of goddesses Amicitia, Concordia, Pax and Justitia. In
addition to Iustitia et Pace, the motto shared by the Institut and The Hague, the host city of this
session, I would therefore like to place our meetings under the auspices of Amicitia and Concordia.
It is indeed the mission of the Institut to foster civility, concord and cooperation among nations
through the clarification of the rules governing their relations.
3. After all, and let us get this clear at the very outset, the Institut is not a self-styled elitist
club indulging in Byzantine discussions about questions of purely theoretical or abstract nature. To
the contrary, its work has a direct and practical impact on the daily life of peoples and on relations
among States. The award of the Nobel Peace prize to the Institut in 1904 bears testimony to this
practical impact. The very creation of the Institut was a reaction to the prevailing state of
international law after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. In a leading article advocating for the
creation of the Institut, Mr. Rolin-Jacquemyns observed the failure of European sovereigns to
convene international conferences to adopt multilateral treaties governing their relations, and
lamented the uncertainties and lacunae in the law, as well as its complete ignorance by those in
charge of its application. Much has changed since then, but some of these words are relevant for
the realities of today.
4. The twentieth century turned out to be a time of profound change for the international
legal system. On the one hand, the century marked the evolution of international law from a system
that was applicable only among a small circle of European States — as indicated in
Rolin-Jacquemyn’s article — to one that has a credible claim to be a universal legal system; one in
which States from all corners of the globe participate, thanks to decolonization and the
emancipation of previously oppressed peoples. On the other hand, international law moved away
from a Westphalian, State-centered system towards a legal order that recognises and responds to
the needs of a plurality of actors, including international organisations, individuals, and
corporations. These are only two of the many challenges that the Institut had to deal with in the
past century.
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5. Today, new challenges are rearing their head. The resilience of international law is being
tested in some quarters. We see attempts to put into question what the Court described in the Corfu
Channel case as “elementary considerations of humanity, even more exacting in peace than in
war”, on which certain international obligations are based (Corfu Channel case (United Kingdom of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland v. Albania), Judgment, Merits, I.C.J. Reports 1949, p. 22). We
also see the sanctity of treaties and pacta sunt servanda increasingly under tension, as international
treaty commitments are repudiated virtually before the ink has dried on the paper on which they
were written, and Multilateralism is shunned.
6. Institutions, like the Institut, dedicated to the advancement of the core values of humanity
and the consolidation of the rule of law at the international level, should not be distracted by noisy
unilateral actions, however disturbing they may be. The “edifice of law carefully constructed by
mankind over a period of centuries”, to which the Court referred in the Tehran hostages case,
stands solid and strong. Its pillars will resist isolated voices of discord and will outlive those who
might be trying to shake them.
7. To those who question the centrality of international law to our daily lives and to the
well-being of humanity, we can offer a few examples of why international law matters; for they
certainly need some enlightenment on this matter.
8. International law matters because no digital communications, no weather forecasting, no
transmission of radio and television across the globe, no internet or telephone connections, could
take place without the web of multilateral rules governing the positioning of satellites in orbit, radio
frequency spectrums and the laying of submarine cables. We would not have been able to fly to this
meeting from all over the world, or have goods transported by air to the far corners of the globe,
without the uniform and predictable rules relating to civil aviation and the carriage of passengers,
baggage and cargo by air.
9. International law matters because financial flows between countries, and international
trade flows would come to a virtual standstill or face enormous difficulties if complex multilateral
rules such as those of the BASEL III regulatory framework for banks, or the GATT and WTO rules
were not in place.
10. International law matters because no State can fight alone and all by itself, global
terrorism, climate change, or the ozone layer depletion, however powerful it might be. No State can
isolate itself from the rest of the world. No State can rely solely on unilateral actions in its
interactions with others. We all know how the isolationist experiment of the Khmers Rouges ended.
11. Finally, international law matters because the peaceful settlement of disputes among
States, through the law, is an acquis of human civilization. With the prohibition of war as a means
of dispute settlement by the UN Charter, humanity has achieved in the past 74 years an
unprecedented level of development, prosperity and cooperation in all spheres of human
endeavour. Barbarism has been kept at bay in most parts of the world. This has made it possible
that an unparalleled amount of energy and resources have been devoted to education, science,
technology, the arts and literature to improve the human condition throughout the globe. What
Mahatma Gandhi had advocated in his letter to Adolf Hitler of 24 December 1940 is being
practiced by many. And I quote the relevant passage from that letter :
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“I appeal to you in the name of humanity to stop the war. You will lose nothing
by referring all the matters in dispute between you and Great Britain to an
international tribunal of your joint choice. If you attain success in the war, it will not
prove that you were in the right. It will only prove that your power of destruction was
greater. Whereas an award by an impartial tribunal will show as far as it is humanly
possible which party was in the right.”
12. The International Court of Justice was established for that very purpose and many
disputes are being referred to it today before they lead to destruction and war. This brings me to the
recent activity of the International Court of Justice which is best summarized by the words of
Ben Ferencz, the last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, as follows:
“There can be no peace without justice, no justice without law and no
meaningful law without a Court to decide what is just and lawful under any given
circumstance.”
13. The Court enjoys today, more than ever before, the trust and confidence of nations from
all over the world. We are proud of that trust which has been progressively secured thanks to the
meticulous work of the Court. At this very moment, sixteen cases are pending before the Court.
Those cases involve 26 nations from all parts of the world: 5 European countries, 6 African
countries, 9 Latin and North American countries, and 6 Asian countries. Since the last session of
the Institute in Hyderabad in September 2017, the Court has rendered five judgements on the merits
and one advisory opinion, two judgements on preliminary objections, three orders on requests for
the indication of provisional measures, and one order on counter-claims.
14. Cases brought to the Court increasingly involve disputes that raise particularly thorny
issues in a politically sensitive context. The number, diversity, and importance of these cases are a
testimony to the increased significance attached by States to the resolution of disputes in
accordance with international law.
15. Two recent developments in the practice of the seisin of the Court deserve to be
highlighted here. The first one is the seisin of the Court in the case concerning Guyana and
Venezuela following a decision by the Secretary General of the United Nations. This was the first
time that a case came to the Court after a determination made by the UN Secretary-General. The
second one relates to the dispute between Guatemala and Belize concerning Guatemala’s
Territorial, Insular and Maritime claims. What is unique about this case is that the two
governments decided to consult their respective populations through referendums on whether or not
their 200-year old territorial and maritime dispute should be submitted to the Court for settlement.
The great news is that the peoples of both countries have overwhelmingly expressed their
confidence in the Court and approved the submission of the case to it, which occurred in May this
year.
16.To go back briefly to the words of Rolin-Jacquemyns lamenting the lack of conferences
to adopt multilateral treaties and lacunae in the law towards the end of the 19th century, it is
interesting to note that both issues are before us today. The Institut may, therefore, have to address
in its future work both the pressures on multilateralism and the lacunae in law arising from rapid
technological advances. Issues such as unilateral “sanctions” which have mushroomed lately,
space-mining, the use of space and spatial objects for military purposes, cyber-warfare and
cybercrimes, privacy and big data mining and certain uses of artificial intelligence such as
autonomous weapons will undoubtedly require the Institut’s full attention in the near future.
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17. We have to go even further than that. We have to reflect on the societal concerns and the
complex realities of the world around us. Therefore, in the hope of stimulating such further
reflections, I will refer, in conclusion, to a famous European painter, a thirteenth-century Persian
poet, and a philosophical concept cherished by many African peoples, which I consider to be
relevant to Today’s realities.
18. The painter is Max Ernest whose cautionary tale and warning in his painting entitled
“Fireside Angel” of 1937, did not attract enough attention to avert chaos and destruction in Europe,
and much of the rest of the world. The question is: will present-day warnings be heeded in certain
parts of the world?
19. The poet is Saadi of Shiraz who already in the thirteenth century had beautifully
expressed the interconnectedness of humanity in the following verses:
“Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul,
If one member is afflicted with pain,
Other members uneasy will remain,
If you have no sympathy for human pain,
The name of human you cannot retain.”
20. In Africa, we have a philosophical concept, which expresses the same ideas with one
word: Ubuntu.
21. I thank you for your attention.
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Keynote speech by H.E. Mr. Abdulqawi A. Yusuf, President of the International Court of Justice, at the 79th Session of the Institut de droit international