The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law has made a distinguished contribution to global legal affairs


I always used to be rather sceptical about international law. Every domestic legal system in the world depends, ultimately, on the power of the state to enforce the rulings of its courts. How can you have international law without an international police force?



The example I always gave is a ruling from the International Court of Justice in The Hague, which I covered in 1986. The court found, by a majority, that the United States had acted in breach of its obligations not to intervene in Nicaragua. Americans had trained, armed, equipped, financed and supplied the Contra forces, as well as laying mines in Nicaragua’s waters. As a result, the US was ordered to pay reparations.



Knowing what was coming, the US delegation had chosen not to turn up for the ruling. I remember watching attendants filling the water glasses on the table marked United States of America, knowing that nobody would ever drink from them.



Another failure of international law is explored by Professor Philippe Sands QC in his book Torture Team, published today. Sands concludes that interrogations of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay violated international treaties prohibiting torture. He considers whether legal action could ever be taken against those responsible.



Despite my scepticism, I hope I now have a more nuanced view of international law. One reason is a fascinating conversation I enjoyed in Cambridge recently with Sir Elihu Lauterpacht QC, who bears one of the most distinguished names in international law.



His late father, Sir Hersch Lauterpacht, was born in 1897 into a middle-class Jewish family in Galicia, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After studying in Vienna, Sir Hersch settled in England in 1923, teaching at the London School of Economics and then in Cambridge. He became the British judge at the International Court of Justice in 1954, delivering judgments and dissenting opinions that are still cited today. Sir Hersch served for five years before becoming ill and dying at the age of 62.



He and his wife Rachel had one child, born almost 80 years ago in 1928. It was perhaps inevitable that his son would become a lawyer, though he rebelled to the extent of starting out at the commercial bar rather than becoming a don. But Sir Hersch soon steered his son into the direction he had chosen for him, and Lauterpacht junior became a leading international lawyer – and occasional judge – as well as a don at Trinity College, Oxford.



The Lauterpacht Centre for International Law was established in 1983 and celebrates its 25th anniversary in July with a high-powered conference, at which two former presidents of the International Court will pay tribute to Sir Elihu. Visitors to the research centre named in his honour will be shown the two substantial private houses adapted for the centre’s use – and potential donors will no doubt be reminded of the major contribution that the centre and its visiting scholars make to international law.



But is this really ‘law’ at all? When I put my caricature of it to Sir Elihu, he was polite enough to acknowledge that there were some disputes between warring states that did not lend themselves to international legal control.



‘But if you leave that kind of situation aside, the whole fabric of international relations is governed by international law,’ he explained. ‘There are thousands of treaties that regulate relations between states over a wide range of matters.



‘Trade is one of the most important. We have the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which is vitally important for liberalising trade. That’s international law – and states do adhere to it. To the extent that they may disagree with each other over the application of a particular WTO rule, the WTO has a disputes settlement mechanism. There is also the possibility of controlled retaliatory conduct if states fall short of honouring their commitments.’



In addition to treaties, uncodified ‘customary’ international law may be used to decide boundary disputes between neighbouring states. For the past seven years, Sir Elihu has been president of the Eritrea-Ethiopia Boundary Commission, set up to resolve a border dispute between the two countries that led to a two-year conflict in which 70,000 people died. The commission decided within two years where the 1,000km boundary should run. But marking out the boundary on the ground met with some resistance, first from one side and then the other. So the commission announced, by reference to modern global positioning techniques, exactly where it would put its marker pillars if the parties had allowed it to. Fortunately, neither side has objected to this – ‘because it’s in the interests of both parties that they should not go to war again over the boundary’.



Control of the environment was another matter for international legal regulation, Sir Elihu continued. Treaties should be sufficiently sophisticated to ensure that states which did not honour their obligations in full could in some way be brought to book – not by force, of course, but through such sanctions as the withholding of trade benefits.



He rattles through air transport, patents and trademarks – and the law of the sea, now largely codified by the UN convention of 1982 which regulates territorial waters, control of fisheries and use of the high seas. ‘All these are matters that are controlled by international law and, on the whole, controlled successfully,’ says Sir Elihu.



He has every reason to feel proud of the Lauterpacht contribution to Britain’s distinguished role.



joshua@rozenberg.net