13 Jun Nigeria and Cameroon Implement ICJ Judgment
In a rare triumph for the ICJ, Nigeria and Cameroon agreed yesterday to implement the 2002 ICJ judgment awarding the Bakassi Peninsula to Cameroon. Under the agreement, Nigeria will begin withdrawing its troops from Bakassi within 60 days.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan hailed the agreement as a “remarkable experiment in conflict prevention by Cameroon and Nigeria.” And he’s right, for a change. There is no doubt that the ICJ served an important role in settling what could have been a fairly serious military dispute between the two African countries. Although the ICJ issued its judgment in 2002, the details of the withdrawal have been handled by the Cameroon-Nigeria Mixed Commission.
Although this is a good day for the U.N., the ICJ, and international dispute resolution in general, one should be cautious about overstating its significance. In many ways, the ICJ served more as a useful coordinating mechanism then an authoritative legal actor. Both parties had an incentive to settle the dispute and the ICJ offered a useful mechanism for doing that (it did take from 1994-2002 for the ICJ to do that, but that quibble is for another day). But even after the ICJ judgment, it took four years of further negotiations to finally close the chapter here. I wonder if the relatively positive political changes in Nigeria over the past four years has also had something to do with the success of this ICJ judgment. And it is worth noting that previous agreements to implement the judgment (see below) have fallen through.
But all in all, a good day for the ICJ and for what international dispute resolution can accomplish when the right conditions are present.
I’m curious how, exactly, the implementation of the Cameroon-Nigeria dispute is a “rare triumph” for the International Court of Justice. Looking back through the Court’s recent decisions, I find consistent “triumphs” for the Court’s mission of settling disputes amicably and according to international law. Congo-Uganda: the ICJ, perhaps alone among international actors, held Uganda liable for its invasion of the Congo and attacks upon Congolese citizens. Avena: the United States accepted the judgment and the President ordered the states to comply with the ICJ’s decision (I’m ignoring possible U.S. constitutional law issues). The NATO cases: the Court held that it lacked jurisdiction to hear Serbia’s spurious claims.
Your criticisms of the pace at which the Court proceeds are inapt, as it is the parties to the dispute that request this schedule, not the Court. (Indeed, the Court has in recent years had to deny some requests for an even more drawn out schedule.) Ultimately, the ICJ is an international dispute resolution body that serves at the pleasure of states; it cannot impose its jurisdiction over any state that does not, through one means or another, accept such, and its scheduling and other procedural rules are designed to satisfy the states that choose to bring disputes to the Court for settlement. To the extent the Court sought to impose schedules that states did not accept, states would be less rather than more likely to bring their disputes to the Court for settlement, and would be more likely to leave disputes festering or resort to force.
Moreover, the Court’s sixty years of jurisprudence has clarified countless rules of international law, giving states a legal framework through which to settle disputes either at the ICJ or through alternative means of dispute resolution, including negotiations and arbitration. The prominence of these rules has no doubt led to their internalization by states and their agents, which has in turn helped to reinforce the notion of a system of laws and rules governing international relations between states. If the Court were more hasty in issuing its judgments, they would not be as widely accepted as interpretative of international law as they are.
There is more complexity and nuance to the ICJ and international dispute resolution than you have addressed, for all your opportunities to do so. I think that both Opinio Juris and its readers would be better served by a more substantive discussion of these questions than by another posting beating this dead horse about how long ICJ decisions seem to take to be handed down or implemented.
Thanks Christopher, now Opinio Juris (I almost typed ‘OJ,’ but it didn’t sound quite right) will be spared my verbose (and sometimes ‘snide’) comments. At any rate, at least on this post.
Is it really necessary for you to comment so regularly on this weblog, Patrick? Particularly where your comments have absolutely no probative value, as here. You would do well to spare others your constant attention-seeking.
Dear Guest,
I’m grateful for your insight into my motivational psychology, as I can’t afford psychotherapy.
I’ll leave it to others as to whether or not my comments have/lack probative value. You’re of course perfectly free to ignore them: perhaps they’re a bit unsettling to you for all the right reasons.
It’s always refreshing to have an ad hominem attack by an anonymous reader.