The Competing Jurisdictions of International Courts and Tribunals.

• Author: Letelier, Ricardo
• Position: Rese

The Competing Jurisdictions of International Courts and Tribunals

Yuval Shany Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2003; 349 págs.

This book is a re-edited and updated version of the author's Ph. D. thesis submitted in 2001 as a result of a doctorate programme completed at the School of Oriental and African Studies of the University of London.

This remarkable text is the outcome of several years of arduous work carried out by the originator. Mr. Shany undertakes a major task in this volume: to review the scope of the overlaps produced due to the increasing proliferation of Courts and Tribunals throughout the international system, focusing on those areas where interaction is most likely to occur. The book contains an exhaustive analysis of this phenomenon quoting abundant casuistical data. At the same time, it applies a pedagogic approach to the subject allowing a clear understanding of the topic dealt with by the author.

As the author states in the Introduction, every domestic system of law is designed to accomplish two basic needs: the regulation of human conduct and the peaceful settlement of disputes. The same needs are present in the international sphere. Thus, the twentieth century brought an explosive rise on international legislation, by means of treaties, state practice and soft law legislation. Over the last few years, interdependence among countries has accelerated the transformation of perspectives about settlement in international disputes. Nations have abandoned their traditional mistrust in submitting themselves in advance to judicial or quasijudicial dispute-settlements mechanisms. This fact is reflected in two important achievements: a growing number of international courts have been invested with compulsory jurisdiction and considerable progress has been made in order to institutionalize dispute-settlement mechanisms, moving from ad-hoc to new and permanent procedures. According to the author, the combination of these two factors allows the advancement of international law into higher levels of effectiveness. However, the emergence of new courts and tribunals has been rather disorganized and has paid little attention to the existence of previous dispute-settlement mechanisms. Thus, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), which has jurisdiction to adjudicate any legal dispute between states, may have concurrent jurisdiction with some specialized international tribunals such as the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). In human rights affairs, the United Nations Human Rights Committee (HRC), a universal human rights quasi-judicial procedure, may have concurrent jurisdiction with regional procedures like the European or the Inter-American Courts of Human Rights. Furthermore, some complex disputes may fall under the jurisdiction of more than one branch of international law. This is the case of some conflicts over the expropriation of foreign investment that can involve investors' protection and human right issues. Thus, it is possible to identify a growing number of disputes submitted to more than one international court of tribunal in recent years. Such a scenario leads the author to state that the question of the division of labour between international courts and tribunals poses a challenge regarding the very nature of the international legal system in terms of determining whether it is coordinated or consists simply in an accumulation of independent self-contained regimes.

The author sets himself three goals: to determine areas of overlapping between compulsory jurisdictions of international courts and tribunals; to discuss the potential consequences of the current situation and the advisability of its mitigation and, finally, to identify and study rules of international law which might govern this phenomenon. The book also examines quasi-judicial procedures which are increasingly...