Legitimacy And International Courts

An interdisciplinary volume exploring the concept of legitimacy in relation to international courts and what can drive and weaken it.

2.2 Procedural Rules and Issues

These texts on the legitimacy of international courts were framed as a direct reaction to arguments put forward in the book "In Whose Name?" by Armin von Bogdandy und Ingo Venzke. The subjects ranged from a comparison between international organizations and international courts and how they can contribute to democratize international law to assessing the democratic legitimacy of international human rights courts. Therefore the collection is dealing with both theoretical and practical questions regarding the legitimacy of international courts and how such problems relate to fundamental problems of our times.

With the ad hoc tribunals completing their mandates and the International Criminal Court under significant pressure, today's international criminal jurisdictions are at a critical juncture. Their legitimacy cannot be taken for granted. This multidisciplinary volume investigates key issues pertaining to legitimacy: criminal accountability, normative development, truth-discovery, complementarity, regionalism, and judicial cooperation. The volume sheds new light on previously unexplored areas, including the significance of redacted judgements, prosecutors' opening statements, rehabilitative processes of international convicts, victim expectations, court financing, and NGO activism. The book's original contributions will appeal to researchers, practitioners, advocates, and students of international criminal justice, accountability for war crimes and the rule of law.

There has been intense debate in recent times over the legitimacy or otherwise of international law. This book contains fresh perspectives on these questions, offered at an international and interdisciplinary conference hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Law and International Law. At issue are questions including, for example, whether international law lacks legitimacy in general and whether international law or a part of it has yielded to the facts of power.

Evaluates the fundamental legitimacy of judicial practice in the growing number of environmental cases heard before international courts.

"This book provides a critical legal perspective on the legitimacy of international courts and tribunals. The volume offers a critique of ideology of two legal approaches to the legitimacy of the Inter American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) that portray it as a supranational tribunal whose last say on human rights protection has a transformative effect on the democracies of Latin America. The book shows how the discussion between these Latin American legal strands mirrors global trends in the study of the legitimacy of international courts related to the use of constitutional analogies and concepts such as the notion of judicial dialogue and the idea of democratic transformation. It also provides an in-depth analysis of how, through the use of those categories, legal experts studying the legitimacy of the IACtHR enact self-validation processes by making themselves the principal agents of transformation. These self-validation processes work as ideological apparatuses that reproduce and entrench the mindset that the legal discipline is a driving force of change in itself. Further, the book shows how profiling the Court as an agent of transformation diverts attention from the ways in which it has pursued a particular view of human rights and democracy in the region that creates and reproduces relations of inequality and domination. Rather than discarding the IACtHR, this book aims to decentre the focus away from formal legal institutions, engaging with the idea that ordinary people can mobilize and define the content of law to transform their lives and territories. The book will be a valuable resource for scholars working in the areas of human rights law, law, public international law, legal theory, constitutional political science, and legal philosophy"--

The vast majority of all international judicial decisions have been issued since 1990. This increasing activity of international courts over the past two decades is one of the most significant developments within the international law. It has repercussions on all levels of governance and has challenged received understandings of the nature and legitimacy of international courts. It was previously held that international courts are simply instruments of dispute settlement, whose activities are justified by the consent of the states that created them, and in whose name they decide. However, this understanding ignores other important judicial functions, underrates problems of legitimacy, and prevents a full assessment of how international adjudication functions, and the impact that it has demonstrably had. This book proposes a public law theory of international adjudication, which argues that international courts are multifunctional actors who exercise public authority and therefore require democratic legitimacy. It establishes this theory on the basis of three main building blocks: multifunctionality, the notion of an international public authority, and democracy. The book aims to answer the core question of the legitimacy of international adjudication: in whose name do international courts decide? It lays out the specific problem of the legitimacy of international adjudication, and reconstructs the common critiques of international courts. It develops a concept of democracy for international courts that makes it possible to constructively show how their legitimacy is derived. It argues that ultimately international courts make their decisions, even if they do not know it, in the name of the peoples and the citizens of the international community.