The Declaratory Judgment in Recent Jurisprudence of the ICJ: Conflicting Approaches to State Responsibility?

Abstract

As the list of contentious cases concerning issues of state responsibility brought before the International Court of Justice (the Court) continues to grow, a closer consideration is demanded of the most common remedy granted by the Court – the declaratory judgment. In particular, while the Court continues to issue declarations intended to constitute ‘appropriate satisfaction’, it also appears that the Court is – or is attempting – to use declarations more creatively in certain circumstances. This immediately provokes a question as to not only the proper role of declaratory judgments, but also whether and to what extent variations in the nature of the obligations owed by states, or the nature of their internationally wrongful acts, gives rise to a coherent differentiation in the remedies granted by the Court.

Ukraine crisis: Types of interventions, punishment of crimes and international law

“…Therefore, the existence of one's own jurisdiction is needed as we have seen in the Equatorial Guinea v. France case and the American Yearbook of International Law-AYIL, vol.1, 2022 related precautionary order of 7 December 2016 1 . In reality, this clause does not impose any particular preliminary requirements and we continue to say that the problem continues to be the existence of a dispute with various points for discussion and decision and as Ukraine rightly used in its appeal: "(…) a disagreement on a point of view of law, a conflict of legal views or interests (…)" (Mcintyre, 2016) 2 .…”