Making Better International Law

This publication contains the texts of the papers presented at the UN Colloquium, together with a record of those presentations and of the discussions which took place around them.

Change and Stability in International Law-Making.

The book explores the various means of making non-conventional/non-treaty law and the cross-cutting issues that they raise. Law-making by technical/informal expert bodies, Conferences of Parties, international organizations, the UN Security Council, regional organizations and arrangements and non-state actors is examined in turn. This forms the basis for the analysis of the complementarity of international treaty law, customary international law and non-traditional law-making, potential subject matters of non-treaty law-making, domestic consequences of non-treaty law-making, proliferation of actors, commissions and treaty bodies of the UN system, and International courts and tribunals.

This is a study of the principal negotiating processes and law-making tools through which contemporary international law is made. It does not seek to give an account of the traditional - and untraditional - sources and theories of international law, but rather to identify the processes, participants and instruments employed in the making of international law. It accordingly examines some of the mechanisms and procedures whereby new rules of law are created or old rules are amended or abrogated. It concentrates on the UN, other international organisations, diplomatic conferences, codification bodies, NGOs, and courts. Every society perceives the need to differentiate between its legal norms and other norms controlling social, economic and political behaviour. But unlike domestic legal systems where this distinction is typically determined by constitutional provisions, the decentralised nature of the international legal system makes this a complex and contested issue. Moreover, contemporary international law is often the product of a subtle and evolving interplay of law-making instruments, both binding and non-binding, and of customary law and general principles. Only in this broader context can the significance of so-called 'soft law' and multilateral treaties be fully appreciated. An important question posed by any examination of international law-making structures is the extent to which we can or should make judgments about their legitimacy and coherence, and if so in what terms. Put simply, a law-making process perceived to be illegitimate or incoherent is more likely to be an ineffective process. From this perspective, the assumption of law-making power by the UN Security Council offers unique advantages of speed and universality, but it also poses a particular challenge to the development of a more open and participatory process observable in other international law-making bodies.

As the world approaches the end of the twentieth century it becomes clear that the global legal system governing relations between the members of the international community is passing through a period of profound change. The traditional lawmaking techniques, established largely at the beginning of this century, were constituted so as to provide for only gradual reforms within a limited and homogeneous community of states. Faced with a growing number of global problems, the international community has discovered that the traditional legal system lacks effective procedures for rapid generation of new international legal norms. Law-Making in the International Community examines to what extent the transformations in the social and the legal infrastructures of the international community have affected the traditional rules, determining how international law is to be made or changed. By focusing on actual state practice, official statements of governments and the pronouncements of the World Court, this book seeks to clarify the content and significance of the existing community consensus concerning the authoritative methods of lawmaking.

Teaches how and why states make, break, and uphold international law using accessible explanations and contemporary international issues.