Introduction

• Author: Anthony Connerty
• Profession: Barrister and member of WIPO arbitration panel
• Pages: 103-

"We may understand the materials upon which Greek philosophers were working if we look at an exhortation addressed by Demosthenes to an Athenian jury. Men ought to obey the law, he said, for four reasons: because laws were prescribed by God, because they were a tradition taught by wise men who knew the good old customs, because they were deductions from an eternal and immutable moral code, and because they were agreements of men with each other binding them because of a moral duty to keep their promises."

Roscoe Pound ⁴⁹

Page 103

Part III of the Manual deals with the international dispute settlement bodies handling the types of dispute discussed in Part II, namely territorial disputes, maritime delimitation disputes and investor-State disputes.

The inter-State courts and tribunals dealing with these areas of dispute differ in two major ways from the international commercial dispute resolution bodies that will be considered in Part IV. First, they tend to have been created by international conventions or agreements; and second, they are likely to apply international law, rather than national law, in dealing with these types of dispute.

The international dispute settlement organisations considered in this part of the Manual are:

1 the International Court of Justice (ICJ);

2 the Permanent Court of Arbitration (PCA);

3 the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS);

4 the International Centre for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID).

The ICJ is described in Article 92 of the United Nations Charter as the "principal judicial organ" of the United Nations. It was created after the Second World War and superseded the Permanent Court of International Justice, created in 1920 under the...